Nesting Dropbox and Skydrive

[TopGearCat]

I keep all of my school work in Dropbox for backup purposes, and I've been very pleased. It works great, has saved my ass after a HDD failure, and I'm reluctant to transfer everything over to a different cloud.

But now that I have the Surface 2, I'm considering how to work in another device. The Dropbox app on the S2 seems rather limited. I can open a file and edit it on the S2, but it doesn't seamlessly sync to a local version on the S2's hard drive, right?

Then I found this article about nesting Dropbox and SkyDrive. Use SkyDrive, Dropbox, and Google Drive Together For Uber Backup Security | PCMag.com

Would doing what the article describes let me seamlessly access files via SkyDrive on my Surface 2 and Dropbox on my laptop (Win7) and sync everything together? Or alternatively, is there some way to fully implement Dropbox on the S2 that I'm not seeing?

 

[daniielrp]

I'm not sure if this could work, as it suggests placing the Dropbox folder inside the SkyDrive folder (which would work) but as you said the Dropbox app on the Surface 2 is very limited and afaik doesn't let you specify the folder location. In fact, I'm pretty sure the app simply is a wrapper to the website essentially, I don't think it ever stores files locally.

However, I can't see any reason why you couldn't set this up on your Windows 7 laptop. If you're dropbox folder is inside your SkyDrive folder on the Win7 laptop, then you could exclusively use SkyDrive on the Surface 2, and changes/updates/syncs would go to the SkyDrive folder and whenever your Win7 laptop is turned on, the Dropbox folder will update too as it is inside the SkyDrive folder.

 

[TopGearCat]

Thanks for the confirmation. I didn't want to try it without a second opinion.

The dropbox app for Surface is indeed just a wrapper, much like the android phone app is. You can open a file from the cloud, but you don't have a local copy (except presumably in temp folders).

ANYWAY. I tried it, and it worked.
I moved my laptop's local Dropbox folder into the local Skydrive folder (you right click on the system tray icon and use the Move function, as described in the article I linked to). After my laptop uploaded my entire Dropbox folder contents to Skydrive (took a while), all of the files show up in my Surface's local SkyDrive folder in Explorer.

It took a few tries to find the proper .onetoc2 file (OneNote table of contents file) on my S2 that displayed all the sub notebooks, but when I got that figured out, something typed in OneNote on my Surface showed up in the OneNote notebook on my laptop the next time I opened it.

For future reference, from the article, in case the link goes bad:

All you have to do in Windows 7 or the Windows 8 desktop (this can't be done in the limited Windows 8 apps) is right click the Dropbox icon in the system tray and select Preferences. On the Advanced tab, you'll see Dropbox listed at C:\Users\username\My Dropbox. Click Move to pick a new location and put the contents in C:\Users\username\
SkyDrive\Dropbox.

And just like that, your data is redundant. The files in the Dropbox folder will now be backed up to both services and synced with your other computers using SkyDrive and Dropbox. You'll have access to all the files with the SkyDrive app.

SkyDrive is considerably slower than Dropbox at keeping the cloud copy up-to-date, incidentally. I can see the system tray icons churning and Dropbox is always done first.

 

[daniielrp]

Awesome to see that it worked!

And I've also noticed SkyDrive being considerably slower than Dropbox, but this is hopefully something they can work over the next few months.

 

[hotphil]

I'd be wary of combining various cloud storage. But then I've been stung with various data losses over the years. One thing I would say from experience is that cloud storage isn't a backup solution. If you value your data you should have a proper backup solution in place.