I haven't talked about the Drobo yet, but it's quite possibly the perfect local backup machine. It acts like an external drive, but uses logic to store all your files redundantly across multiple drives inside the Drobo. So if you have two 1TB drives, it will show as 1TB of storage and mirror across the two drive. If one dies, your files are still safe and you can just plug in another drive to get the Drobo back up and running again.

Here's a great video about the Drobo, if you're not convinced.

The exciting part is that there's a great way to save a lot of money on a first generation Drobo. B&H currently has a first generation Drobo for only $349 with free shipping. I have the first gen Drobo and the only difference between that and the new Drobo is the new one has FireWire 800, not very useful if you mainly use PCs and not Macs.

A Drobo isn't much good without at least two drives. But Amazon is selling Seagate 1TB Hard Drives for only $109 with free shipping! UPDATE:They also have Western Digital Caviar 1TB Hard Drives on sale at the same price. This means you could have a full Drobo RAID-like external hard drive system for only $569.00!

That still may sound like a lot for an external hard drive, but being able to have one device that you can put files on and it will automatically back itself up on multiple drives is the holy grail of local backup. Plus, if you ever need more storage, you can just buy another cheap hard drive, plug it into the Drobo, and instantly have more space to store your stuff. With four hard drive bays on the device, there's plenty of room to grow.

I will be talking more about how the Drobo works in a future post. You can do fine with just regular external hard drives, but I've found that once you out grow a drive like that, you have to get another and they just start stacking up everywhere. Plus, if the drive dies, you've lost the whole thing and have to start over with a new one. If that's the only place you keep that data, the data is just gone. With the Drobo, I can just buy another drive, plug it in and go. I would recommend getting one if you can, and would really recommend getting one now with these prices the way they are.

So, I talked about Dropbox in general, now I'll get to specifics on what I think is one of it's most useful features; versioning.

I'll be mainly talking about text, but you could easily adapt this to Photoshop files or Word files or whatever you work in. These techniques will work with any file on your computer, but just be aware of the 2GB limit.

• Working
  

  Synced Document in Dropbox

  You'll be working the way you always do, except you'll be working within the Dropbox folder in your computer's home folder. When you're connected to the Internet, every time you save the file, it will upload the change to the Dropbox site as an immediate remote backup. Feel free to create folders to organize your work. Dropbox will keep that file structure on the getdropbox.com site as well.

  When you see the green checkbox next to your file, you know that your file has been successfully saved to your online Dropbox.

• Revisions

  Dropbox will create a new revision each time you save your file. You will have access to all past revisions and can see when they were saved and how big the files are. If you right click on a file in your Dropbox folder, you'll get a Dropbox submenu that will take you to the revision list in your browser. From there you can save any past versions to your computer and, if you want to roll back to a previous version, just copy and paste it over the existing file in your Dropbox folder.

  

  Revision Menu

  One note to be aware of. If you rename or move a file, you will lose the revisions that related to it because Dropbox will think you deleted it. You can get to the old file by going into the getdropbox.com interface and selecting the Show Deleted Files button.

  

  Deleted Files

• Sharing

  If you right click on a folder, you can view it's sharing options. This will allow you to share your Dropbox folder and all of it's contents with another Dropbox user, provided you know their email address. If they aren't already signed up with Dropbox, this will also send them an invitation to join. It's a great way to keep a group of people in sync with important documents.

  More to the point, all versions of a document are tagged with the person's name who made it, so you'll know exactly who changed what within a file. And since every version is saved, you won't need to worry about overwriting someone else's changes. In fact, if two people edit the same file at the same time, Dropbox will actually notify you that it happened and allow you to fix it by giving you both files.

  

  Folder Sharing

  You can also drop things in the Public folder within Dropbox. This allows anyone to download the file through a simple web link. They won't be able to edit and upload the file back to your Dropbox, but it's a quick way to distribute files to users over email or IM to a group of people.

I think Dropbox is what I call an active file backup, meaning it backs up your work as you work on it. In fact, Dropbox is probably the best way of doing this I've seen, mainly because it's also a remote backup. If your computer dies in the middle of what you're doing, you haven't lost all of your changes and you'll be able to hop on another computer, install Dropbox and be back up and running.

You can find more about all of these features over at the Dropbox FAQ.