Dropbox or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Use Web Apps
Like a good nerd, the day I heard about Dropbox I installed it. I made use of it's free storage, it's painless sync'ing. Funny pictures, apps, books, music: it all went in, it all got sync'd. This was extremely helpful when I started working. Install Dropbox on work machine, wait for it to sync, and there are all my NES/SNES games and emulators waiting for some quality procrastination to sink in. Or that picture I really wanted to use as my background. Or that music I wanted to listen to. All sync'd, all in one place. Organized, efficient, localized; Dropbox.
Then a change of mind: why do I keep all this stuff that I find online on my local machine? I'm basically just duplicating files which already exist in locations online, offline for ease of access. There are websites which already tackle this problem. Thus, my quest began, to migrate from Dropbox to existing services, and remove another program from my machine.
Rationale
A quick aside: I'm a pretty silly guy. Not in the comedic sense, though I have been known to bring the funny. No, more in a principles way; I have silly concepts of things. Philosophical quandries and quagmires aside, some of these silly ideas pertain to my computer and related maintenance. See, I like having control of my environment. That's tough in life, but easy on a computer. It's part of the reason I love Linux so much.
From One to Many
There are many places that the previously all centralized content of my Dropbox is heading.
- Pictures are heading to imgur, for ease of storage and ease of access to both download and share.
- Music is heading to Google Play, or Amazon. Either one will work, but not quite decided yet.
- Books to Amazon Kindle or Google Books depending on format.
- Most documents will go to Google Drive.
- Most applications won't go anywhere, they'll also be replaced.