How Dropbox Saved the Day

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I knew there was something missing.

Then, it hit me; on Sunday, I’d spent a good hour or so adding some particularly important items to the costs section of my cash flow forecast.

Only, those items were no longer there. More frustratingly, I’d only spotted their absence after I’d updated a bunch of stuff in the spreadsheet.

I was entering the bowels of Spreadsheet Hell. It’s where they send you if you’ve been really naughty during your life.

Something had gone wrong with the Dropbox sync (it hadn’t synced my changes from Sunday, to be more precise). That meant I had been sitting there adding rows, formulas, and formatting to my lovely spreadsheet, blissfully unaware that I was updating an old version.

This resulted in much swearing, an unlikely saviour, and a valuable lesson learned.

My (terrible) backup routine

People often ask me to reveal my backup routine as part of a YouTube video dedicated to the subject.

My response is usually, “Yeah, of course – I’ll do something in the future”.

This is for one simple reason: my current backup routine is rather dreadful. Sharing it would be like sharing my post-workout stretch routine, which is also dreadful.

My backup ‘routine’ consists of an M1 Mac mini connected to a BackBlaze account and a 4TB external archive drive. The archive drive isn’t involved in any kind of automation; I simply manually copy stuff to it when I feel I need to.

For instance, yesterday, I brought it home from the studio and copied the entire project and library files for my new Skillshare class to the drive for safekeeping. This was silly, long-winded, and littered with potential pitfalls.

I also have to remember to copy my exported YouTube videos to that archive drive, from my external Sandisk SSDs. You know, nothing important – just my life’s work.

The archive drive and entire contents of the Mac mini – including another external SSD buried neatly within its AGPTEK hub – then get backed up daily (and, thankfully, automatically) to Backblaze.

There is, clearly, far too much manual stuff involved here, and, as we all know, the weakest part of the chain in any tech ‘stack’ is the human. As a result, my backup routine didn’t help one bit during my frantic search for the right version of that spreadsheet.

I also don’t use Time Machine these days, which means I had no option of reverting to an earlier version of the said spreadsheet.

Or did I?

The problem with Dropbox

I’m acutely aware that most of my important stuff sits on Dropbox. This is both a blessing and a worry.

I’m a big fan of Dropbox. I’ve used it for many years to make switching between devices – and setting them up – as simple as possible. It is, on the whole, pretty flawless.

Until something doesn’t sync properly.

Then, you’re in a whole world of pain, and often without any forewarning. That is unless you’re inclined to check file modification dates and times, which I’m not, because, well, I have a big to-do list and friends and stuff.

The worry with storing practically everything on Dropbox is that it’s only ever going to be backed up by yours truly if a physical copy of each file resides on the drive you are backing up. In my case, that means I need to ensure everything I hold dear on Dropbox is kept as a local file on the Mac mini (you can choose to keep files on Dropbox and only download them when needed in order to preserve local storage).

Still awake at the back? Hello?

This makes Dropbox another manual effort and point of failure. And guess what? That spreadsheet hadn’t been synced locally to the Mac mini. Because, of course it hadn’t.

So, you can probably see why I was tearing my hair out yesterday after realising that I’d been editing the wrong version of a spreadsheet with no meaningful backup to call on.

The hidden beauty of Dropbox

By the time I reached the coffee machine to counter my spreadsheet woes with a hit of caffeine, I’d lost all hope.

No backup. No Time Machine. A greyed-out Browse Version History in Excel. Zero ideas of exactly what I’d added to the spreadsheet a day earlier.

Then, it struck me. When right-clicking on any file on a Dropbox-enabled Mac, you get a bunch of Dropbox-related options to choose from.

What if…

I ran back to my Mac*, right-clicked on the spreadsheet and scoured the available options.

Bingo!

There, in front of me, were the words Version History. Clicking that option logged me into Dropbox on Safari and immediately presented a glorious list of every single saved version of that spreadsheet.

I could preview and download each one. It even revealed when I’d renamed the file, deleted it, or moved it.

I genuinely had no idea this was an option on Dropbox. It’s quite a generous one, too. If you’re on their Basic, Plus, or Family plan, you get 30 days’ worth of previous file versions.

If, like me, you have their Professional plan, that jumps up to 180 days.

It’s an ever-present, versioned backup system that I didn’t realise I had. Joyous!

Moral of the story

Dropbox somehow caused and saved my bad spreadsheet day. But I’m not suggesting you rely on Dropbox for backups. It is, after all, a third-party service, and yet another point of failure.

What if Dropbox disappears tomorrow? What if you fail to pay the bill and they shut down your account? What if they get hacked?

But there’s no escaping the fact that Dropbox saved my bacon yesterday. That spreadsheet is incredibly important, and the stuff that was missing could have had quite an impact further down the line if ignored.

I’m going to work on my backup routine, I promise. But it’s rather lovely to discover that, sometimes, tech companies have our backs – even when we don’t know that’s the case.

*walked. It was half a foot away. But that doesn’t sound as dramatic, does it?