Since Website 2 Backup v3.0 you can backup your website files and databases to the popular cloud storage Dropbox. We will see in this article what is exactly Dropbox, how it works, what are its advantages and disadvantages in the website backup surrounding.
Dropbox History and technology
Dropbox comes from an idea of Drew Houston who forgot regularly his USB drive. He started to do something for himself and he has thunk that can be helpful for other people. Dropbox was officially open in 2008. It has received a total capital funding of $257.2 million from several investors. Its business model is based on the Freemium, it offers a free 2GB account and paid account of 50Go, 100Go, and team accounts of 1To or more. In October 2011 Dropbox has 50 million of users, 96% are using a free account, and has an annual revenue of $240 million.
Dropbox uses Amazon S3 cloud storage, but can switch to a different storage provider in the future. The files are encrypted on server using a AES-256 key. Dropbox uses deduplication, if a file has already been uploaded by a user, the file will link to the existing copy.
The Power of Dropbox for Website Backup
The Dropbox terms of service and acceptable use allow you to use several Dropbox accounts. When you look on search engine multiple Dropbox accounts is used by many people. You can create several free Dropbox accounts. You can manage several Dropbox accounts in Website 2 Backup.
How to backup your website to multiple free Dropbox accounts :
- Create one email account for each backup. With your shared web hosting you can, normally, create emails aliases or emails forwarders. And forward those emails to your main email. For example if your website has one blog and one e-commerce you should create 4 emails addresses : one email address for the blog files (backup.blog.files@my_website.com), one email address for the blog database (backup.blog.database@my_website.com), one email address for the e-commerce files (backup.ecommerce.files@my_website.com) and one email address for the e-commerce database (backup.ecommerce.database@my_website.com).
- Create a free Dropbox account for each backup with the previously created emails accounts. You can remove all the examples and files available on a newly created account. You can create a directory to store your backups in your Dropbox account.
- Add the Dropbox accounts to your W2B administration. Be sure to be logged in the right Dropbox account before to validate it.
The Limitations of Dropbox for Website Backup
If you use free Dropbox accounts you are limited by the 2Go free space. Website 2 Backup helps you to manage this :
- Use the incremental files backup functionality to backup your website folders. The incremental backup only new and modified files, you use less storage space.
- Activate the Dropbox error alert to receive an email when you have only 100Mo of free space on your Dropbox account.
Dropbox is not as secure as it seems :
- Dropbox use a single AES-256 key to encrypt every file. If an intruder gets the key, as well as a Dropbox employees, they could decrypt any file from the Dropbox backend storage infrastructure.
- Even if Dropbox declares to use SSL connexion for file transfer, we have done successful backups transfer from servers without SSL.
For all those reasons you have to use the W2B backup encryption to secure your backups during transfer and on Dropbox servers.
We have seen in this article what is Dropbox, how to use it to backup your website with free multiple accounts, and what you should care when you use it to backup your website. You are now ready to manage your website backup to Dropbox with W2B.
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