![]() Moral of that story: back up your data!ĭropbox is handy here, while I don’t advocate it as a complete backup service (and it shouldn’t be treated as such), it does provide a medium layer of backup, and a bit of piece of mind. Thankfully we could restore a bit of his data, but he still lost around 8 months worth of work. Furthermore, he was somewhat paranoid about someone stealing his research and so while he kept notebooks for lab sessions, he destroyed the data after he had digitised it. ![]() From chapters of his thesis through to the raw data that made up his workings. Now he had all of his digitised data on that machine, and I do mean ALL of his data. He was lugging his PC along with him, and to cut a longer story short the machine had been fried in an unfortunate lightning strike. Years ago when I was working in IT Support at the John Curtin School of Medical Research, I had a PhD student come to me in a panic. When your laptop goes missing, or Word eats a document, then you don’t have to worry as much about losing everything. The other bonus with Dropbox is that it provides a good backup service. As a little side note, if you want to have a folder appear at the top of a listing every time then just put an ! at the start of the folder name, as you can see from my screenshot. They can be changed later, but the earlier you start with a structure the more natural it feels. I recommend that you sit down for a bit and try and figure out a logical structure early on. You can see mine in the screenshot, and it works for me. The key to working with Dropbox is to have a good folder organisation system. Having other app support is quite critical in some ways, so I would encourage you to find an app that works with everything that you want to work with. Now one of the reasons that I have stuck with Dropbox is that as an early service provider it is generally also supported by other applications, like GoodReader on my iPad which I will look briefly at next week. But the basic functionality that I use is simply to share files around the place. There are a ton of other features of Dropbox, such as shared folders (Gill and I use this regularly), and a bunch more. While there are a ton of services that offer this feature, I started with Dropbox and given that it hasn’t eaten all my documents yet, I’m happy to stay with it. To be able to find the needle in the haystack, you first have to have an accessible haystack.īasically Dropbox works by synchronising everything you place in its folder into the cloud, and then replicating that sync to each machine. What happens if I am reading a document at home, and then head into college and it isn’t there. This does present a bit of a problem though, how to transfer files around. On the other hand my desktop and new rMBP are a bit more precious and generally stay at home or within eyesight. The laptop on my desk at college is an older Macbook Pro, which I am happy to leave just locked in an office. ![]() In my broader environment I have three machines, two laptops and a desktop. While having a cloud synced storage option is not completely needed, it is an excellent way to work. However, even now I am constantly surprised by the number of people who don’t use a cloud synced service like Dropbox, and even more surprisingly have never heard of the option. Dropboxĭropbox is a bit of a staple of many organisational systems, being one of the early cloud file storage services. It involves just two applications, that link into my overall structure: Dropbox, and DEVONthink. However, this current system is a lot more streamlined, easy to use, and relatively simple in practice. While in my first system the organisation was a mess of folder tabs and hanging files, my later, early digital, systems involved portable usb sticks, complex synchronisation scripts, and a plethora of duplicated files. I think we have all been there, after all that is why the meme works so well. But sometimes it can feel like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Now, where did I put that document again?Īny organisational system is only as good as how easy it is to find the material you are looking for, and this system is no different.
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