Storing personal and work files

[LibbyG]

I've had a personal Dropbox subscription for years now, and I have it installed on my work computer. I also send my phone-photo uploads there too. But now my institution is going whole-hog Office 365, and they definitely won't let me install Dropbox next time around. They may make me take it off.

I'm fine with putting all my work stuff on the college OneDrive, but I also want to have my teaching and research materials in a storage space I control, just in case the college goes kablooey (a remote risk, but still). At the same time, I've gotten spoiled with just saving everything to Dropbox, so I don't want to have to manually upload my stuff to something like Dropbox on the browser all the time.

So, any advice from the Fora? What are my options? Is there a way to have parallel storage that doesn't require a lot of back and forth?

I don't have my own laptop because, with my smartphone, I haven't needed one. But maybe that's part of the solution?

[tuxthepenguin]

I've had a personal Dropbox subscription for years now, and I have it installed on my work computer. I also send my phone-photo uploads there too. But now my institution is going whole-hog Office 365, and they definitely won't let me install Dropbox next time around. They may make me take it off.

Time to go on the job market. (Not really, but sort of.) It would be really stupid for them to disrupt your productivity like this.

I'm fine with putting all my work stuff on the college OneDrive, but I also want to have my teaching and research materials in a storage space I control, just in case the college goes kablooey (a remote risk, but still). At the same time, I've gotten spoiled with just saving everything to Dropbox, so I don't want to have to manually upload my stuff to something like Dropbox on the browser all the time.

In the unlikely event that your school shuts down, or the more likely event that they cancel the 365 subscription, you can easily download all your files at that time. If need be, you can get a personal subscription to 365 for less than your subscription to Dropbox.

[archaeo42]

Does not allowing Dropbox mean they'll be blocking access the to the Dropbox website? If not, you could still add and access files through the web.

[spork]

Does not allowing Dropbox mean they'll be blocking access the to the Dropbox website? If not, you could still add and access files through the web.

I think it means what happened to faculty at my employer: we were informed that Dropbox had been deemed insecure and would no longer be installed on the laptops issued to faculty, AND the university's IT overlords had chosen OneDrive as its cloud storage "solution" since they had already chained the university to the Microsoft 365 bus.

As a result, I have automatic syncing to my university OneDrive account but I also manually dump files to my Google Drive, whether work-related or personal. I found Dropbox to be too clunky without automatic syncing.

[artalot]

I also maintain a personal Dropbox account and my uni recently switched to Office 365. The switch didn't impede my access to Dropbox - it's still on my work computer, it still syncs, and I can still save and open files easily. Now, if you are getting a new computer that might be another story. We never get new computers, so I'm not concerned.

[spork]

I also maintain a personal Dropbox account and my uni recently switched to Office 365. The switch didn't impede my access to Dropbox - it's still on my work computer, it still syncs, and I can still save and open files easily. Now, if you are getting a new computer that might be another story. We never get new computers, so I'm not concerned.

It's another story if IT mandates installation of a newer OS and uses that as an opportunity to stop installing the Dropbox desktop app.

[magnemite]

just a fun fyi, but at Pokemon University, state law would prohibit that as an unethical use of state resources for personal matters. We had a presentation on legal matters like this, and the person from the state AG office said even streaming music over the interweb, even via wifi, would be a violation (and we've had staff disciplined for this, so it's no joke).

So, at least here, the answer is to maintain a clear separation between work and personal materials.

[San Joaquin]

Yes.  One previous employer actually installed software that prevented college employees from copying or downloading files off the 365/shared site.  Prepare for a full disengagement between work and home if you can.  With the enhanced security concerns, I think it likely that having your work be that kind of portable is about to go away.  Call me Cassandra.  :-)

[spork]

Yes.  One previous employer actually installed software that prevented college employees from copying or downloading files off the 365/shared site.  Prepare for a full disengagement between work and home if you can.  With the enhanced security concerns, I think it likely that having your work be that kind of portable is about to go away.  Call me Cassandra.  :-)

But how would that work for teaching online, for example? I am not going to commute to campus and plug into the network there just to teach an online course.

[mamselle]

Are there any restrictions on backing up to an external hard drive? (Then taking it home and plugging in to backup while you eat dinner?)

I'm pretty sure I was able to do that in a couple situations that didnt allow for Dropbox, etc.

M.

[Hibush]

Are there any restrictions on backing up to an external hard drive? (Then taking it home and plugging in to backup while you eat dinner?)

I'm pretty sure I was able to do that in a couple situations that didnt allow for Dropbox, etc.

M.

A one terabyte flash drive will set you back about $30 these days. If university IT makes your company computing appliance nearly unusable, you should still be able to connect that.

[San Joaquin]

Yes.  One previous employer actually installed software that prevented college employees from copying or downloading files off the 365/shared site.  Prepare for a full disengagement between work and home if you can.  With the enhanced security concerns, I think it likely that having your work be that kind of portable is about to go away.  Call me Cassandra.  :-)

But how would that work for teaching online, for example? I am not going to commute to campus and plug into the network there just to teach an online course.

Alas, I don't know.  It was one of the many interesting tech innovations that occurred as I was leaving.  I suspect the Law of Unintended Consequences may have kicked in, as there was no consultation before implementation.

[tuxthepenguin]

Yes.  One previous employer actually installed software that prevented college employees from copying or downloading files off the 365/shared site.  Prepare for a full disengagement between work and home if you can.  With the enhanced security concerns, I think it likely that having your work be that kind of portable is about to go away.  Call me Cassandra.  :-)

That's definitely NOT something you'd do for security purposes. One reason schools pay for services like OneDrive is because that's 1000x more secure for information like student exam scores than scattered around on USB drives, laptops, and paper.

[Aster]

I use personal flash drives and (solid-state) portable hard drives for everything. They never leave my office or my pocket except when they're plugged into a classroom computer, and I clip a ginormous bright-colored lanyard from them so they're never forgotten and left in an unsecured environment. I take my primary flash drive with me home whenever I need to work at home. I don't need an internet connection, special software apps, or special software security handshakes with the college to do work at home. I just need a USB port.

My home computers are much better with much better software than my office computer. My office computer doesn't even have Microsoft Office loaded on it. Our college saves money by having most all school computers operate most software remotely instead of from internal hard drives. This means that whenever the data line is down, our office, classroom, administrative computers are bricked and useless. This happens several times a semester.

The school's internal servers (until they were recently outsourced to a vendor) are just for backups to backups. Now we're using OneDrive, which is discernibly worse than our internal servers. OneDrive is slow, somewhat glitchy, and occasionally just down for some reason. Outsourcing sucks.

Even my smartphone photos are transferred via flash drive. It is great in keeping the photo clutter totally managed and cleaned up on a smartphone. I have the weird curly flash drive that's designed for iPhones (and that is almost always sold out at Best Buy).

[Biologist_]

Wow. We have OneDrive and I don't think I can name anyone here who actually uses it to store or back up files. I can think of lots of people who use personal Dropbox subscriptions (and/or Google Drive) to sync between multiple work machines or a work machine and a personal laptop. I sync all of my work files and all of my personal files through Dropbox so that I have them on my work laptop and my home laptop. I use my work computer to do something personal now and then, but I spend a heck of a lot more time and effort using my personal laptop to do work.

For the OP, do you have administrator rights to your work computer or do you have to ask for software to be installed? If you can't install Dropbox, I would do an offline backup to a personal hard drive (or two) periodically. If it's just an emergency backup in addition to OneDrive, it doesn't need to be perfectly up to date. Even though all of my stuff is in the cloud, I still back up to an offline hard drive every month or so.