Back at the office we have the Network version of Paper Tiger Filing System Software for document management installed on a Windows 2008 Server. Our Paper Tiger is setup for automatic backups, so that our most recent backups are located at “C:\PaperTiger PTNETWORK41 DBBackups”. See our blog post The Paper Tiger Enhancement with Automatic Archive Option for instructions to configure Paper Tiger for automatic archiving of your database.
Whenever we need to retrieve a backup file, we must physically be in-front of the Windows 2008 Server machine. Suppose our CEO took a month vacation to Japan, and left us at the office. If our boss asks for a backup file of our Paper Tiger Databases, we would have to .zip the file to him via email every time he makes a request. We are a large data information firm and we are constantly updating and moving files. Anything that we send our boss becomes extremely outdated within 30 minutes. What is the ideal solution for this situation? An asynchronous backup folder via Dropbox.
Dropbox is a great way to automatically backup your data and get access to it from anywhere with an easy to use web interface. It even provides you with a full history of changes (added recently) and a versioning system, so you can always get back that accidentally overwritten file. Your free 2GB is extendable to 5GB just by inviting others to the service (the invitees get themselves another 250MB for free as well).
When dropbox installs, it creates a folder (My Dropbox) and only synchronizes whatever is in that one folder. This means that you would have to move all the .BAK files into that single folder. This can become extremely time consuming and ultimately pointless if you plan to have an automatically synced backup system in place.
No need to mingle with that then, use symbolic links to point Dropbox to the folders! Symbolic links are, simply put, transparent shortcuts to a file or folder somewhere else (locally or via a (SMB) network path). This means that the files can be accessed from such a symbolic link just as if they were physically there. The only difference is that if you remove the symbolic link, the actual (source) file or folder will not be removed.
Making It Work
After you have downloaded and installed Dropbox, a “My Dropbox” folder will be created in your “My Documents” folder. Everything placed in the “My Dropbox” folder can be accessed anywhere you have an internet connection.
You have to just create a folder in your “My Dropbox” folder named “PTNetwork”. “PTNetwork” will be identical to “PTNETWORK41 DBBackups” except the newly created “PTNetwork” folder can be accessed anywhere in the world.
Then we must create a symbolic link from our “PTNETWORK41 DBBackups” folder to the “My Dropbox” folder.
mklink /D “C:\Users\UserName\Documents\My Dropbox\PTNetwork” “C:\PaperTiger PTNETWORK41 DBBackups”
That’s it. You’re done. You will see in the following screen shot, the newly created folder for PTNetwork in the Dropbox folder.
For more information on symlinks and how to use them on different operating systems, check out the wiki page at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS_symbolic_link
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Tags: Dropbox, Tips for Using The Paper Tiger
