Need Strategy Advice on how to get TB's of data from external drives to DB Biz Unlimited

Hi Jason,

So, I'm going to go in reverse here and start with your questions about Dropbox Business then work our way back up.

Re: Pricing-

Dropbox Business plans have a minimum of 5 users, the pricing page is showing you a break down of that per license cost. Presently there is not an option for a team of fewer than 5 licenses (please note theres no requirement that all licenses be occupied).

We do recommend that each individual have their own account/license since shared logins is not something we can support (from what I've read it sounds like you and your wife already have separate accounts so you should be fine here).

As for 'as much space as you need' Dropbox Business subscriptions, they start with a base quota thats calculated by adding 1TB per license on the team, so the standard 5 user base plan will have 5TBs. Since this subscription is calculated by how many user licenses you require, once a Team gets close to that 5TB quota they just need to email the support team to have this amount manually adjusted. Since we do have to have the server space on our end to match the quota allotment provided, this process helps us ensure that we're growing at the same rate our users are.

As for Symlinks, their usage is not advised or supported by the Dropbox team, as the Dropbox desktop app can get stuck attempting to access the files they point to and can cause issues such as high CPU usage, poor syncing performance, permissions issues and quota usage disparities (just to name a few).

As for getting the (approx) 6TB of external Drive onto the Dropbox Business subscription if you choose to go that route, I'd suggest checking out this article (technically for server migrations but still rings true here): https://www.dropbox.com/help/9116

Two main things to keep in mind for a large migration are:

1. If you've moved the Dropbox folder to an external drive, you want to ensure that your computer and that drive do not become disconnected. When the application loses connection to the syncing folder, the application will interpret this as you intentionally deleting that folder and it's content and it will sync those changes to your account.

2. The performance of the Dropbox application may start to decline in certain tasks when you have more than 300,000 files in one account, so you'll want to keep an eye on your batch size for this migration (please note this is a file count limit, not file size). You can read more about this here: https://www.dropbox.com/help/39


I hope all this is useful! Let me know if you have any other questions here :)

I understand you when I hear you are tired of having lot of hard drives, issues with disks, replacements, etc and you want to have it everything on the cloud.

 

The problem is Dropbox Pro don't allow you to have more than 1TB, you will need a Business account in order to have 5TB and then contact Support in order to allocate extra space for you. I believe a good feature in Dropbox Pro in the future is the option to purchase additional space in 1TB increments from current 1TB to 20 or more TB. But this is not possible now.

 

If you don't want do goes to the complex task of moving some files, use selective sync, delete the files, etc etc in order to upload all your 6TB to Dropbox, you can perhaps install a SATA 6TB or 8TB HDD internal into a PC, move all files there, install Dropbox and upload everything from there. But I don't know if this is possible for you because you have a Mac.

 

 

But I believe this is a weird and complex scenario. You need to backup your Dropbox content as well because if any of your devices are infected with ransomware and your Dropbox content (or part of it) is encrypted, yes, you can recover by using Extended Version History in Dropbox or by contacting support and opening a ticket regarding a deletion event, but this can take days due to the ammount of files you have and because Dropbox it's a mirror/sync service, not a backup service.

 

If I was you, I will get a Synology NAS with 2 x 6TB Red WD HDD disks in Raid 1 (or 4x 4TB disks in raid 10)... never ever use raid5 please... in order to get solid 6 or 8TB available space. If one disk fails, no problem, your data is still available, you can hot swap the damaged disk, insert a replacement and the Syno will rebuild the data. 

 

A 2nd 8TB hdd disk archive can help you as a backup.

 

Synology NAS have built-In Dropbox client, so you can have all your 6TB of data in your NAS backed up in Dropbox as well! Cool! no?

 

Another option:

 

Backing up your data with Carbonite, Crashplan, etc will be expensive! Perhaps you can get something like Amazon S3 or Amazon Glacier. This is cheap, very cheap backup solution (You need to check the differences because Glacier is very very cheap but is pretty much designed as a write once, retrieve never - retrieve it only in case of disaster).

 

Please let me know if any of this options sounds good for you and we will discuss the details!