So I recently made a shared Dropbox folder for a bunch of family history/genealogy stuff for my extended family. I then invited everyone in the family to share it.
Trouble is, Dropbox (which I find insanely useful in a lot of contexts) isn’t really the right tool for this job:
(1) It’s super easy to accidentally remove files from a dropbox share entirely, because dragging them from dropbox onto somewhere else actually removes them
(2) Dropbox mirrors all its files onto your actual hard disk, so if this folder continues to grow over time it would eventually eat all of everyone’s HD space
(3) I’d like some model with shared ownership. If I die tomorrow and then no one pays my dropbox bill, the whole thing will presumably cease to exist.
(4) Obviously permanence is somewhat wishful thinking when talking about cloud storage, but the more permanent the better (ie, google drive seems unlikely to just vanish overnight at this point, but who knows about geni.com, where our family tree is online?)
All of that said, the convenience of dropbox, where it just looks like another folder on your desktop, and you can browse around and open files of all types and copy things in super-easily and so forth, is great.
Any suggestions?
thanks!
Did I misread how that feature works? What I want is for the files to be visible, and you can click around and see them and open them up, but they’re only actually synced down to the disk when needed. My understanding is that selective sync just hides that folder from certain computers entirely.
Dropbox has file versioning. If a file gets moved or deleted, you should be able to restore it easily.
(2) kinda precludes (3) in this context. If everybody [who uses the desktop client, not the web client] has a local copy, then the fact that you didn’t make plans for the archive in your estate doesn’t really matter.
Really, there’s no elegant way to deal with (3) at a consumer level. Somebody needs to pay the bill, and when they stop paying, the data’s gone unless somebody else made a local backup.
Sure, but you can easily imagine a system where if the owner stops paying the bill, then all the people the volume is shared with get sent an email saying that there’s 60 days before all the data gets deleted, but any one of them can take over ownership if they provide payment, etc.
I don’t have any specific suggestions, except to say that if the solution you choose maps the cloud storage as a volume which Windows users will have native read/write access, the shared files will be vulnerable to ransomware from any one of the people sharing them.
So… if you do go for a solution that works that way, you probably need the following features:
Versioning or backup of the content
Central management of user rights (so you can cut off an infected client while they deal with their infection)
There are internet enabled external drives available pretty cheap (2TB start at about $140). I decided to go that route and give my family members access to the external drive as opposed to paying a subscription service.