Dropbox Advice for Working with Teams & Contractors

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March 10, 2011
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By:
Dannyoutlaw
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48 Comments
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Articles

Like most people in the industry, I use Dropbox to share files with client, team members, and contractors. For what it is, Dropbox is the cornerstone of file sharing services. Despite it’s easy of use and simple sharing solutions, it does have its drawbacks. Recently I had the sickening experience of realizing one of my contractors deleted a folder of three years and several thousand dollars worth of work. Needless to say, I almost passed out at the keyboard when I learned this.

Do they have a acronym for that one yet? POAK?

I digress. Long story short, I manage to get most of the files back. But, it made do an audit on how I was handling file backups, sharing, and storage.

Advice on Using Dropbox

As I mentioned before, this incident forced me to audit how I was doing things. My first order of business was to organize Dropbox in a manner that would still be useful to me and my team, but reduce the risk of similar accidents. Here are a few things I suggest doing with your Dropbox folders.

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Working with Team Members & Contractors
If you insist on only using Dropbox as your means of file sharing, I suggest you setup each team member and contractor with their own folder versus a global project folder. One of Dropboxes bigest downfalls is that you can not share individual files within a folder. You have to share the whole folder.

To remedy this situation, I create folders for each team member or contractor and only place copies of the files they need in their folder. Obviously this disrupts the normal workflow of using Dropbox a little, but I have found it to be quite useful.

As a side note, I having started using Box.net to share individual files and whole project folders with contractors and clients. Box.net allows you to only share specific files from within a folder, which makes it much easier to share finished products with both clients and team members.

Add the Packrat Option
Maybe I shouldn’t do this, but I use Dropbox as a faux online backup. I have a ton of files and resources that only live in my Dropbox folders, nowhere else, which is the opening statement was so gut wrenching. While Dropbox does allow you to restore deleted files, this is only good for 30 days. After that, the files are lost forever.

However, Dropbox offers an option to upgrade your account for a few extra dollars that allows to restore deleted files, no matter how long ago the were deleted.

I strongly suggest using this if you use Dropbox in a similar “faux backup drive” manner.

Always Copy Files into Contractors FIles
As an experienced Dropbox user, you are probably aware that if you delete something from a shared folder, its deleted across any machine using that folder. However, many new Dropbox user , like contractors, may not be aware of this and think that deleting files only effect their machine.

Obviously this is not the case, but we can’t really blame the user. Dropbox does a poor job of explaining this and has no real conformation or failsafe in place other than to restore deleted files.

In Closing

I’d like to point out that despite these pitfalls, Dropbox is still an awesome tool and one I continue to use. If you haven’t jumped on this bandwagon, you are missing out. It is a lifesaver if you work from multiple machine or with team members in other locations. I highly suggest signing up today.

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48 Comments

Max

March 14, 2011 9:24 pm Reply

So…was the folder with all that content deleted more than 30 days ago? Otherwise you would have just un-deleted it, I presume.

Cailen D'Sa

March 15, 2011 10:56 pm Reply

Keeping with the theme of using Dropbox for business use (or a multi-user groups), we have just rolled out a new product configuration called Dropbox for Teams. One of the key features it offers is a component called “Rewind”. This feature provides all users with infinite time based recovery of any deleted data or previous versions of files. We store this for an infinite time window and it does not count against your storage quota.

You can read more at http://www.dropbox.com/teams

Thanks for the fantastic write up!

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May 5, 2011 11:07 am Reply

Thanks Cailen for sharing your thoughts to us, I’m using drop for most of the time for business matter and thankfully never encounter any problems yet. I will check your website for more information.

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March 15, 2011 6:26 pm Reply

This is a great article, I could learn a lot of interesting information about working with teams

Guest

April 12, 2011 9:19 am Reply

Hi, good post. I have been pondering this topic,so thanks for sharing. I’ll likely be coming back to your posts. …

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April 12, 2011 11:17 am Reply

your design blog site is really excellent! I’ve fund lots of helpful tips! thanks a lot for sharing

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April 16, 2011 3:28 am Reply

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April 27, 2011 4:19 pm Reply

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It’s really great post.Thanks for shearing it. Great tutorial and techniques well explained.

Dave

May 5, 2011 12:13 pm Reply

Nice blog here Danny – spent too much time today on it though

May 8, 2011 5:25 pm Reply

We use dropbox every day.

PS. Your blog + Opera = Total destruction

Web designing

May 11, 2011 6:34 pm Reply

Dropbox is useful feature in web and it is also some limitation but thanks to you for sharing few knowledgeable tips about Dropbox. Thanks

Rongdhonu Graphics

May 17, 2011 2:41 am Reply

I have using drop box for long time. It has lots of advantages……………….

Elizabeth

May 19, 2011 12:26 am Reply

I agree that dropbox is very useful but there has been a complaint to the FTC against it due to lack of security. It alleges Dropbox has been misleading consumers because even with the upload encryption, users are still at risk of court-authorized government searches, rogue Dropbox employees, and even companies trying to bring mass copyright-infringement suits. Apparently, Dropbox’s website suggests otherwise and now has gotten flak over it. The article where I found the information can be found here: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/05/dropbox-ftc/

I remember being told once that the web design industry is not just about selling websites. What we sell is trust and security: trust in the quality of work and security in the rights of intellectual property belongs to our clients. The complaint if true highlights a breach of both cornerstones in our industry. What are your thoughts?

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May 24, 2011 5:52 am Reply

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Dave Dold

July 15, 2011 7:56 pm Reply

You also can now provide read/view only links to any file or folder in your Dropbox account:

http://www.dropbox.com/help/167

Super handy for distributing material to outside contractors or clients who don’t need to sync changes back to you.

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July 18, 2011 8:47 pm Reply

thanks for sharing.

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Paul

August 1, 2011 12:36 am Reply

Thank you for sharing this article. I’ll be sure to employ the knowledge learned! I use DropBox daily BTW, so I really do appreciate the value of the advice given.

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August 12, 2011 5:12 am Reply

Great advice, definitely need to use the online backup option and it’s totally worth taking the time to create separate folders with limited access for others. I like your duplicate file idea too! Thanks!

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December 16, 2011 3:27 am Reply

Crazy that you would only have backups on dropbox – I dont think I could sleep at night…

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December 29, 2011 11:37 pm Reply

This is definitely a helpful overview of how to share with Dropbox! With any important information, the more backups, the better!

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Philip

January 6, 2012 7:47 pm Reply

I use Time Machine with Dropbox –

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March 8, 2012 5:52 am Reply

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January 25, 2012 5:20 am Reply

hi danny. I know that dropbox is useful for sharing information to team . but I think for backup of file an folders is not safe in dropbox and it will be maintain in another place.

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February 26, 2012 12:38 am Reply

wow, I have always treated dropbox as an online memory stick (not in the backing-up way) so using it as back-up is just a crazy thought to me. Like if I want to link clients to see files, they’d be copies and not the original. You made an interesting point though, abuot box.net and the 30-day recovery that I didn’t know about. but if I were to use it as storage I wouldn’t link ANYONE to it and/or definitely have files elsewhere too. Storing thing solely online seems like putting things in the air to me…

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March 8, 2012 4:46 pm Reply

wow that’s a huge drawback! for my file sharing and online storage I use http://www.maxxo.com much better UI than dropbox and they give away 5GB free.