When right-clicking on any file on a Dropbox-enabled Mac, you get a bunch of Dropbox-related options to choose from. Zero ideas of exactly what I’d added to the spreadsheet a day earlier. A greyed-out Browse Version History in Excel. The hidden beauty of Dropboxīy the time I reached the coffee machine to counter my spreadsheet woes with a hit of caffeine, I’d lost all hope. 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. And guess what? That spreadsheet hadn’t been synced locally to the Mac mini. This makes Dropbox another manual effort and point of failure. 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). 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. 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. Then, you’re in a whole world of pain, and often without any forewarning. I’ve used it for many years to make switching between devices – and setting them up – as simple as possible. I’m acutely aware that most of my important stuff sits on Dropbox. 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. As a result, my backup routine didn’t help one bit during my frantic search for the right version of that spreadsheet. 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. 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. You know, nothing important – just my life’s work. I also have to remember to copy my exported YouTube videos to that archive drive, from my external Sandisk SSDs. This was silly, long-winded, and littered with potential pitfalls. The archive drive isn’t involved in any kind of automation I simply manually copy stuff to it when I feel I need to.įor 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. My backup ‘routine’ consists of an M1 Mac mini connected to a BackBlaze account and a 4TB external archive drive. Sharing it would be like sharing my post-workout stretch routine, which is also dreadful. This is for one simple reason: my current backup routine is rather dreadful. My response is usually, “Yeah, of course – I’ll do something in the future”. People often ask me to reveal my backup routine as part of a YouTube video dedicated to the subject. This resulted in much swearing, an unlikely saviour, and a valuable lesson learned. 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. Something had gone wrong with the Dropbox sync (it hadn’t synced my changes from Sunday, to be more precise). It’s where they send you if you’ve been really naughty during your life. I was entering the bowels of Spreadsheet Hell. More frustratingly, I’d only spotted their absence after I’d updated a bunch of stuff in the spreadsheet. 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.
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