Organizing Your Computer With Dropbox

Organizing your computer with Dropbox can mean the difference between saving important files and losing them forever should your computer crash. Dropbox is an excellent resource for busy moms as well as business people. Don't forget to check out the rest of the organizing tips series!

Take advantage of organizing your computer with Dropbox to make sure you don't lose track of anything important.  Baby photos, important documents, and work projects can all be saved into a Dropbox account for access from anywhere.  Syncing Dropbox on all of your devices is simple and an excellent way to keep track of important items at home, work, or on the go.

Organizing Your Computer with Dropbox

Setup a free Dropbox account

To begin you'll need to set up your own Dropbox account. You can get a free 2gig of storage by signing up.  To increase the amount of storage available, you can ask others to sign up under you for their own free account.  Dropbox can then be downloaded to your desktop, accessed on your smartphone, or in your Internet browser.

Upgrade for additional storage

You can easily upgrade for additional storage for as low as $100 per year.  The monthly fee is around $9.99 for up to 1 Terabyte of storage. This is recommended for anyone who has a lot of image files.  Are you storing your kids' baby pictures?  This $100 per year is well worth it to know you won't lose them even if your hard drive or phone crash.

Setup your smartphone to backup to Dropbox

Add the Dropbox app to your phone to back up pictures, image files, and more on the go. It's a great way to keep all of those pictures you take safely stored while freeing up space on your phone storage. It came in handy when my smartphone decided to overheat & die.  All the photos I've taken were saved, except the ones in the last couple of hours that hadn't synced yet.

Sort into personal and business folders

Create folders for personal and business needs.  You can create two main folders, then subfolders within them. By keeping things organized for easy access, it will be simple to locate what you need on a regular basis. Create folders for taxes, mortgages, budgets, and images.  You can then sort those out by year, child, schools, etc. To make it easy to account for anything you need at any time.

I treat my folders like an outline. I have only a few top-level folders.

• _Business
• _Client
• _Personal

Then a few others that haven't been sorted, like “Camera Uploads”, “Old Downloads”, and a few others that were brought over from other devices. As I have time, I go through them deleting unnecessary files and then place files and photos into the correct area.

Within each top-level folder, I have subfolders and loose files. Loose files either mean there isn't enough of a type to warrant a folder yet or I haven't sorted it down yet.

• _Business
  • _Blog Management
  • _Blog Stats
  • _Business Courses & Resources
  • _Taxes
  • _WP
• _Client
  • _Client Contracts
  • _Client Resources
  • Client 1
  • Client 2
  • Client 3
• _Personal
  • _Homeschool
  • _Medical
  • _Photos
  • _Taxes
  • Family
  • Visa Stuff

And within those folders, I might have another layer (or ten) of subfolders as needed to keep things organized. Some of those top-level folders have 20-30 folders in them, but I only use a handful each time. I like to use _ or * to keep them at the top because I regularly clean up & sort alphabetically.

Sync files regularly

You can usually set up your Dropbox to sync any time you are online, but you will want to make sure if using it on your computer that you make sure files have synced before you shut down just in case there is a problem rebooting.  You can also manually upload files into the Dropbox folders online. Also check your phone, tablet, or other computers regularly to make sure everything is synced across all devices.

Smart Sync

Dropbox offers a smart sync option so you can keep some files local and some online only. This lets me save space on my computer. Like previous years' taxes and old homeschool, records are saved in Dropbox but not on my computer. And my husband doesn't need 12 years of blogging images on his computer, so he syncs things as needed.

Organizing your computer with Dropbox gives you peace of mind.  Not only will you have everything safely stored in one folder instead of scattered throughout your computer files, but you'll also be able to access it no matter what happens to your computer.  Being able to know your pictures, tax files, budgets, and important documents are easy to access from anywhere is great peace of mind everyone needs.

Looking for more organizing tips?  Check out the entire 31 Days to an Organized Home series!

More Organizing Tips:

• How to Keep Your Homeschool Papers Organized
• 7 Simple Homeschool Organization Tips
• An Organized Fridge for an Organized Kitchen
• Organizing Your Homeschool Space
• Organizing Your Recipe Collection & Meal Plans
• Organizing Tips for the Garage

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