Be Excellent To Each Other

I'm constantly nagging my mum to backup the photos she has on her laptop onto the pen drive I gave her as I know she'll be devastated if the HD dies and she loses them all. Of course, she never does. So over Crimbo I want to set up some kind of auto-sync thing on her laptop so all of her photos get synced with an online account so they're stored in the cloud and are safe in case of puter death.

Sooooooo, geeks, what do you recommend I use to achieve this? I'm hoping for something REALLY simple (it's for my Mum, remember). Preferably with an auto sync function so that when she drags pictures into a folder or opens them in an application (Picasa?) they get auto-synced with an account online. Like I mentioned, Picasa might do it. She won't need to view or do anything with the pictures online so maybe some kind of dropbox thing might work? Obviously FTP is way too complex.

Thanks!

Dropbox.

Yeah I'd just use Picasa, so long as she already has a Google account. Extra storage is pretty cheap if you need it.

How does it work? Is it dead easy and Mum proof? Is it free?

She doesn't have a Google account, otherwise I'd have probs just gone for that. I get the impression Google are in the process of killing Picasa though since the web version is pretty much hidden now in favour of Google+.

Dropbox and Synctoy.

I haven't used Picasa much recently but since Google+ came about, it does seem to be centered around that.

I vote Dropbox too. It's as simple as dragging and dropping folders about the place.

With dropbox, do you nominate a folder on your laptop and then tell it to automatically keep this synced with a folder on dropbox? Does it then take care of everything for you? Is it that simple? If it is, this would be perfect.

I’m sure someone else who knows more about this will be able to answer this question better but you could just have your pictures folder, within the Dropbox folder.

It’ll automatically update when anything is altered in there so I guess the answer to your question is yes.

I can send an invite too if you like, not only do I get more space but I believe if you sign up from a recommendation, you get more space than the usual too.

Oooh, cheers mate, I'll PM you my mum's email address if you could invite her that would be great. Thanks!

No problem. I'll do it when I get home from work if that's alright?

brilliant, ta. I'll be setting this up when I'm back at my parents for Xmas at the weekend, so no rush

No. Yes. Yes.

Will this Synctoy Crater mentioned turn that first "no" into a "yes"?

Yes.

TheVision sent me an invite so I been playing on my work PC. By installing the dropbox software it let me nominate a folder and then it keeps the contents of this folder synced online and on other devices, so that's all I need, no need for Synctoy, I'm guessing?

Sorted, cheers chaps!

Hurrah! Another win for the forum... I hope you find it useful.

Titanium Backup for Android has a "sync backups to dropbox" function built in, so I've set that going. An extra safety net in case I brick my phone is never a bad idea! Cheers!

I was going to mention the dropbox app for Android. I use that now instead of finding a lead to plug my phone into my PC. Very easy.

From memory, I think Dropbox includes a photo folder by default which is public...so unless your mum wants to share her photos with the world then I suggest you tell her to create a new folder which will be private.

Privacy settings of your own folders can be changed to your liking. You can share a folder with friends/family or create links which you can give people to access your photos. So pretty useful really and avoids having to upload (again) to websites such as facebook.

Slightly OT, but ES File Explorer does Dropbox better than the Dropbox app.

Ace, ta, just downloaded, will have a play I always thought the included file explorer app with CyanogenMOD was a bit naff.

Or you could set up a symlink.

But dropbox does do the first thing I asked? Doesn't it? I don't see what the problem is. Everything I chuck into the dropbox folder is synced with a mirrored version online. That's perfect, I don't need to do anything else?

You're correct. If you use the dropbox folders, everything that you put in there syncs online. It sounds like these other programs sync other folders on your PC.

The reason I use synctoy is because I want photos I've finished with, music, and documents put into my dropbox. So that's three different locations on my PC (well, server) that synctoy then copies into the dropbox folder nightly. The other reason is that when I'm dicking around with photos I often have multiple scratch copies, and am regularly saving - There's no point dropbox eating up my bandwidth by syncing everything while it's a work in progress.

I guess it does, yes. If you ever wanted to use it for something else (backing up her MyDocs folder, or something) you'd have to fiddle about, but if you only need the photos root folder, then bingo.

Cool, using it in this super simple way for my Mum's photo backups will be fine. Essentially, I want to set it up for her then she won't have to do anything, it just backups up everything just in case something goes wrong in the future.

Here's a question for me though. I've created an "Android" folder on dropbox to backup up my phone stuff, but I don't need this folder to be mirrored inside my desktop dropbox folder, I just want it as an online backup for my phone. Can I set this folder to only remain online and not be synced to my desktop PC's dropbox folders?

Yes. Go into the Dropbox settings on your computer and turn on Selective Sync.

Yes. Go into the Dropbox settings on your computer and turn on Selective Sync.

And choose the appropriate folder. Obv.

Are you sure you want to do this, though? It allows you to take files from your PC and just drag and drop them onto your phone, no matter if it's plugged in (or even in the same country).

I've just had a vanishing post. Odd.

Anyway, what I said was along the lines of: Are you sure you want to do that? Sure, DB will still back your stuff up, but you'll essentially be turning off all the simple file transfer stuff it provides.

I have to turn it off for my work PC as IT have very kindly given us 1GB of docs storage on our personal network drive. That was generous of them, as after our dept moaned they upgraded us from a lavish 256MB!?!!

Cool, will have a looksy for that.

256MB was, of course, 256MB more than they were required to give you...

Not when our office PC image is set up in a way where our My Documents folder is automatically mapped to our network drive and major privilege lockdown means we can't save anything locally.

Anyway.... dropbox, ace, thanks for the tips folks!

I'm not really convinced that makes any difference...


It is, isn't it? Properly fits the mantra of "do one thing well".