Damian
Acolyte
I am writing my novel using Dropbox to save it on so that it saves to all my other computers. How safe is dropbox? Should I use it to store my novel on? Can anyone steal it? Am I being paranoid?
-
Welcome to the Fantasy Writing Forums. Register Now to join us!
Dropbox
- Thread starter Damian
- Start date
Dropbox is safe enough that plenty of businesses use it to store important files.
I store all my writing in Dropbox.
Option 2) Paranoid.
Unless you are already a profitable author, your work has no real value. No one is going to try to steal it. Don't waste your time worrying about that - waste your time worrying about how to make your work valuable.
I store all my writing in Dropbox.
Option 2) Paranoid.
Unless you are already a profitable author, your work has no real value. No one is going to try to steal it. Don't waste your time worrying about that - waste your time worrying about how to make your work valuable.
You're being paranoid.
Any cloud service is going to have some risk, but Dropbox is secure, both to outsiders and to their own employees (who are restricted from accessing your content). There's always a risk someone could hack in, or an employee with authorization could get in (a risk for any cloud service), but they'd have to end up targeting your account for some reason, and beyond that they'd have to want to steal your novel, which isn't very likely in and of itself.
Any cloud service is going to have some risk, but Dropbox is secure, both to outsiders and to their own employees (who are restricted from accessing your content). There's always a risk someone could hack in, or an employee with authorization could get in (a risk for any cloud service), but they'd have to end up targeting your account for some reason, and beyond that they'd have to want to steal your novel, which isn't very likely in and of itself.
Nihal
Vala
The only danger is to delete by accident it without keeping a backup copy. It's the downside of any cloud service that don't tracks versions.
In fact, Dropbox does have some rudimentary version tracking, as well as the ability to view and restore deleted files (accessible via their website).
Nihal
Vala
Really? I'm behind the times then. Years ago it was used for a project instead of a SVN. Someone deleted and substituted some files by accident... You can imagine the chaos.
Ignore my comment then!
Ignore my comment then!
Benjamin Clayborne
Auror
I endorse the preceding statements by Telcontar and Steerpike. Google Drive would work just as well as Dropbox, I suppose.
I personally use a Subversion repository that lives on my home machine, and is backed up to two remote machines every night via a cron. For The Queen of Mages I wrote in OpenOffice, but that proved problematic for formatting, so now I just write text files with custom formatting markup, and a set of bash/perl scripts that export my custom markup to whatever format I need (pure HTML, Blogger, mobi, etc.).
But then, my degree is in Computer Science and my day job is as a web developer, so the above all comes naturally
I personally use a Subversion repository that lives on my home machine, and is backed up to two remote machines every night via a cron. For The Queen of Mages I wrote in OpenOffice, but that proved problematic for formatting, so now I just write text files with custom formatting markup, and a set of bash/perl scripts that export my custom markup to whatever format I need (pure HTML, Blogger, mobi, etc.).
But then, my degree is in Computer Science and my day job is as a web developer, so the above all comes naturally
