Why Dropbox is a PC builder’s best friend

When catastrophe strikes, having your whole computer in the cloud makes recovery a breeze. Back in 2018, TC Sottek, a senior editor at The Verge, bet his reputation and self-worth on a huge crowdfunded game design project. While the project could have failed for numerous reasons, his primary fear was losing all the local work stored on his custom home-built PC—a nightmare scenario that would anger many people and land him in deep trouble.

Although he maintained local backups, accumulating so many crucial files made local redundancy risky since all copies sat in the exact same physical location. He purchased a Dropbox subscription, which remains one of the software services he happily renews every year. Cloud backup provided peace of mind and simplified collaboration by letting contributors upload files directly and allowing transfers up to 50GB. His workspace quickly accumulated intricate InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator files.

The initial goal was protecting work data against worst-case scenarios, which eventually struck not once, but twice. For reasons still unclear, his home-built PC chewed through two separate 2TB Samsung 970 Evo SSDs. On both occasions, he woke up to find unbootable systems where no drives could be detected. Fortunately, process-of-elimination testing revealed both times that only the drives had failed while the rest of his hardware remained completely functional.

He now uses a 2TB 990 Evo Plus, a drive costing nearly twice his original purchase price due to inflated hardware markets. His family plan costs about $204 annually ($17 a month) and supports up to six members. Solo users can subscribe for $9.99 a month billed annually (around $120 a year) for 2TB of storage, or upgrade to 3TB for about $143 annually.