29th April 2017
I have missed the last 2 weeks of articles mostly due to the passing of my mother. She was a beautiful and kind person that never had a bad word to say about anyone. It was also a comforting thought that no matter what the problem she would lend a sympathetic ear and show empathy and understanding.
I sincerely hope that my mum is now dancing somewhere with my dad who also passed just over a year ago and both still checking if I have written anything worthwhile in these weekly articles. It is the end of a golden era for me and one of life’s obstacles that we all have to hurdle.
This week I need to recognise one of the more recent developments in IT that made the funeral a lot easier to construct in a short space of time. I only have one sibling in the form of my sister Michelle who also wanted to deliver a eulogy with photos and some music in the background. Michelle lives in Sydney and we had a short 6 days between mum’s passing and the funeral.
The amount of communication, sharing of photos and the creation of content for the funeral was made a lot easier by using a Web based storage facility in the form of Drobox. This company has been around since 2007 and has fine-tuned its services to the point that it can now offer not only a reliable and secure backup service but also a convenient platform from which to share information.
With currently around 500 million users, Dropbox has an easy to navigate website and millions of dollars’ worth of storage servers. You can sign up to a free Dropbox account and have 2 Gigabytes of storage – or you can pay $17 per month and have 2 Terabytes of storage and there are more extensive plans as well.
I already had a Dropbox account for all of my photos so I created a new shared folder called ‘Funeral’ and emailed my sister a link to this. She was then able to access all of the photos and documents that I had put into that folder as well as being able to add to it. This helped immensely with preparing 2 Eulogies and the supporting photos and music.
As I mentioned, this company has been around for 10 years and now offers lots of features. For instance they have their own phone app for both iPhones and Android as well as desktop apps for Windows and Macs. You can literally take a photo with your smart phone and have it automatically upload to drop box for safe keeping. The same photo can also automatically download to one or more computers or laptops.
This is one of the best features of Dropbox in that it can keep all of your photos synchronised between multiple devices to say trying to transport files on a USB key. If you are away from home and using a friend’s computer you can simply sign in to the web version of Dropbox to see all of your current files or to add to them from the PC that you are on.
Dropbox also offers the ability to retrieve a file if it was deleted up to 30 days prior and the business versions of Dropbox offer a host of longer term backup retention options.
Future Byte Me topics can be emailed to [email protected] and Bruce is contactable at Kerr Solutions, 205 Musgrave Street or on 49 222 400.
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