Migrating To Dropbox Business For Cloud Storage

During the movement control restriction and Covid-19 pandemic we decided to migrate all our files and folders storage from our own office server to Dropbox Business for cloud storage. We needed this cloud service to allow our teams member to be able to fully working remotely and still able to complete the task needed. Previously they have to come to office to work because our shared data is in the office server. Now the teams and staff can choose to work from home and not having to come to office to sync the data.

We use Dropbox Business to store our office company documents and for project collaboration. Although it is mainly used to replaced our aged server, it is very useful to a greater extent where project and sales team can now collaborate on documents and share files easily.

Office Server 2012

We have been using our own server for files storage and sharing internally for about more than 12 years. We were using Dell Poweredge as the main server powered by Microsoft Server 2003 , 2008 and then Microsoft Server 2012. But running and maintaining the server is not easy and take so much of our time. Since we don’t have a dedicated IT technician we have to rely on reading technical books and sometime engage outside IT company to help when we faced problem.

But through the years we rely heavily on files sharing among the teams to make project collaboration easily. We store office documents, project files, sales lead, massive products catalogue, PDFs, drawing and software. But it work well when the server is connected with the staff desktop and team laptop when they come to office and connect to the network. It can’t work outside the office because most probably we did not set it up.

Dropbox Business

We choose the standard package for each user and it allow up to 5 TB space for secure storage.

Some of the cools feature that we like from using dropbox business is the dropbox rewind and dropbox events. Also it offers Smart Sync and Remote Wipe features which is great for admin management.

Dropbox Business really focus on collaboration and allow teams and staff to share files and documents safely within the organization easily and they can work anywhere as long as they have the internet connection. For security we disable and restrict sharing documents and links to external users, except with the permission of the admin console. In this case we have to trust the team member on how they manage the files on the cloud storage. We can not control if they copy it into their local computer or simply delete the files.

Fortunately the admin console can check activity logs that happen from the dropbox events. It can show deleted files and should they accidentally deleted the files or remove large files in the folders the admin console can easily rewind and get back the files. Dropbox business allow 180 days of file recovery.

The Smart Sync features is quite good as it helps us to save space on our hard drives. We can choose which individual files or folders that might be available online-only or store locally on our computer. In this case we can access large files without taking up hard drive space. If we need to work while offline at the later part we just download these files fully on our laptop.

Remote Wipe is a feature that works the same way as the smartphone security feature. In the event that a team member leaves or devices with Dropbox Business are lost or stolen, files and folders can be remotely wiped from these devices.

Another cool feature that we are trying to getting use to is the Dropbox Paper. Dropbox Paper is a collaboration space for Dropbox user to create and edit documents, comment, and assign related tasks. You can access your Dropbox Paper documents from your Dropbox dashboard. Any new users can just go through the content of the Dropbox Paper of the particular project and will have pretty much good idea of the what the project is all about as they are invited to join.

In the mobile apps feature we can use our mobile phone to snap pictures and scan the documents and covert it into a document and store it into the dropbox folder as a PDF or a PNG file.

Migrating to Dropbox Business as cloud storage and backup is the best deciding for better collaboration. It is an effective tool for file sharing and syncing.

For more information on Dropbox Business