As there are three of us in Knob Jockeys, we’ve thought often about ways to make sharing our library of tunes easier between ourselves. For a while, having the one external hard drive with everything crammed on seemed to work, but more and more we’d spend our practice sessions munging bits and bobs we’d been working on into the main library, and more often that not, sticking stuff in temp and scratch and limbo folders all over the place, never to be found again. Also, a Firewire device chaining incident meant we lost a quarter of our data a couple of years back, which brought home even more the fragility of everything being in one place.

So our first plan: three external hard drives, and then write ourselves some sort of cunning rsync script to try and sync all our data each time we met. Just as this was starting to sound like more effort than we wanted, Dropbox came along. We’d toyed with having having our files online before, we use an iDisk for our downloads for example, but whilst iDisk is great for downloads, it’s damned slow for uploads, and also we’re a one third Windows operation, and with iDisks you can’t easily ‘share’ a bit of it. Also, rather than just being a big hard drive in the sky, Dropbox is a fully fledged CVS (content versioning system), using subversion under the hood. And with the premium service cheaper than three external drives, it was time to take the plunge…

The plan was simple: we each had a Dropbox account, so one of us would sign up for the premium version (50GB limit), and then `share’ a folder with the others. The first thing we discovered that this didn’t work – Dropbox enforce the standard 2GB limit on the other users, as a side-effect of stopping people signing up for 25 free accounts instead of paying. Fair enough really. So our Plan B was to use the one premium account, and link all four of our machines to that one account (three plus an extra one to act as a our own backup – it’s good to be paranoid). And this worked. Eventually.

So that we wouldn’t have to all download 45GB of data and piss off our ISPs, we all took a copy of the complete library, and put it in a folder called ‘Dropbox’. Next, I linked up the backup machine, which happens to sit inside a rather fast network, and 14 hours later all 45GB of tunes were in the cloud! Next, we each linked our home machines to the same Dropbox account, and thankfully because of our little trick, Dropbox simply indexed the data it found on each machine (taking about half an hour) and decided everything was in sync. As a test, we opened up a wav file in Ableton, moved a marker, saved the file and instantly saw Dropbox transfer the changed .asd up to the cloud and down to the other machines. Result!

Once it’s up and running, you just carry on like normal, using your files and whatever as before, editing, adding, deleting, everything just gets relayed to the other machines. Also, there’s a complete web interface that gives you access to everything, plus lets you look at the history of files, deleted files, and a recent changes feed which is cool for keeping up with what’s happening. It’s nice to see the versioning on Dropbox in action – delete a file, then at any point using the web interface you can undo the delete. You can do this as much as you like, as long as you’re aware that the backups use space (on the server, but not on your machine), so if you really want to get rid of something, you select ‘Purge’ to remove it completely.

We did have a couple of small issues, but really they were our own fault, not Dropbox’s, and we were still figuring out the best way to use it. First, a bit of tidying up of the catalogue was done on one machine before the final machine had been linked, and so the final machine linked up happily reverted all of the changes, like an obedient but slightly dim puppy. Second, disregarding the official advice on using external drives, I had sym-linked my copy of the data to an external one to save space. After a reboot one day, Dropbox started up without the drive attached, and doing exactly what it thought was correct, proceeded to delete files in the hundreds per second. Luckily, killing it, reattaching the drive and restarting meant the files all got put back. A lesson learned though.

Finally, just yesterday, my external drive died on me. This perplexed Dropbox a little, but nothing was lost, and knowing our data existed in three other places, it will be an easy job to get it back when my new drive arrives, not the End Of The World like last time.

After all the teething problems, Dropbox is a fantastic product, and its really going to change the way the three of us can work on our material. For £60 a year, we’ve got automatic backups, automatic syncing, and our tunes available to use from anywhere in the world via the web access. This is a handy bonus, it means that we can listen to any tune streamed straight from the server, on any device that’s got a web browser on it.

To sum up, I’d really recommend Dropbox, if you’re either just looking for casual storage, or if you’re going to take the plunge like us. There’s other services out there now offering similar deals, but I can’t imagine how they could do it much better – an elegant interface, and a geekily-good back-end, it works for me. All I’d say is though: always have another backup.

Let us know if you try it out… and speaking of which – if you want to try it give us a yell click here – each referral gets an extra 250MB for both people, so everyone’s a winner!