Dropbox or BigStash?

We are often asked, “Why use BigStash (with it’s inherent time-delay) and not Dropbox (or similar, where my data is always available in real-time)”?

Much like we have different storage classes in the physical world, from closets to drawers, to boxes, to shelves to storage rooms, I believe we need different storage classes in the cloud: long term and short term storage, easily accessible storage and more secure storage, smart storage and dummy storage, storage designed for colaboration and storage designed for archiving, backup storage and so on.

“I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” — Abraham H. Maslow

Dropbox, through its success, has defined a whole class of cloud storage, the one based on syncing. Syncing is a great concept and Dropbox does it amazingly well. But…

…Syncing is not the solution to everything.

Syncing requires one (or more) local copy of your files. Personally I don’t have enough space in my laptop’s SSD to sync all my Dropbox files. So, I end up doing the delicate “selective sync” dance nobody’s comfortable with. And I know I’m not the only one keeping an old machine running back at home just to have a full copy of my Dropbox somewhere.

Syncing makes sure all changes are synced across all your devices. That’s a good thing, right? Right. But it also means that if you opened this important document, made some changes and accidentally saved the new one over the old one (we’ve all been through that, haven’t we?), or if you accidentally deleted a folder with photos thinking you are just moving it, the change will propagate to all your copies. And if you don’t realise it in time, there’s no way to revert.

So, what if you want to put some files (or a copy of them) someplace where they can not be easily deleted or altered, or if you don’t have enough local storage to keep synced copies of everything?

Sometimes, you need to archive, not sync.

In some cases, you don’t want some stuff to be “everywhere”. Sometimes you just need to archive your files in the cloud, and forget about them.

When asked, BigStash users gave us examples of such cases:

• Old projects, especially if they involve large media files, like in the case of graphic designers, audio engineers, video editors, and photographers. These professionals want to keep an archive of old projects, they know they probably won’t access these files for a long time, and they don’t have enough local space to keep them synced with Dropbox.
• GoPro users who want to archive the unedited stream of their videos: They will usually shoot hours of video, just to take a few minutes out of it and they archive the originals at BigStash.
• Podcasters who record multiple streams of (sometimes lossless) audio: After the final version, usually an mp3, is out they are left with GB of audio files they would like to archive.
• System administrators who manage a handful of machines and would like to archive logs, configuration files, old CDs with legacy device drivers, or even system images.
• Anyone who is interested in making a backup copy of some important data and know that they will not be altered or deleted by mistake.

Give it a try (for free).

If one or more of the use cases above sound familiar to you, give BigStash a try. We are giving away 5TB free, for one year: That should be enough space and time to decide if BigStash fits your workflow.

Signup for BigStash, get 5TB free for one year.