Did you know that you can get an on-line (hosted, cloud-based) backup account with a 2 GB capacity from DropBox for free? You can! And if you use compression when creating your SQL backups, you can easily squeeze in below that 2 GB ceiling. (On the Plain English system we're able to include our main GoldMine SQL backup, plus our Quickbooks backup, plus a copy of our entire Quotewerks installation.)

It's simple:

  1. Sign up for your free DropBox account.
  2. Install DropBox on your computer (server, workstation, whatever!)
  3. Create a "Maintenance Plan" in SQL that sends your backup file to the DropBox folder established in step 2.

That's it!

By the way, the Maintenance Plan in step 3 can be in addition to (or instead of) any existing Maintenance Plan or backup you might already have. One huge bonus is that DropBox actually gives you the ability to go back in time and restore previous archived instances of your uploaded files. Just right-click, and choose "Previous Versions."

You'll sleep much better knowing that your most important, mission-critical business data is safely being backed up... off-site... while you sleep... and, oh, did we mention? it's FREE!

Here's the DropBox Getting Started Guide: Download Gleanster Report

Thursday, March 14, 2013