Background:

The renewal on my annual Mozy Backup subscription was due, and I decided that I wanted to consolidate backup solutions. Dropbox had (recently?) upped their Pro plan to 1TB, so there was plenty of room to back up a 100GB iPhoto library.

I made the switch on Wednesday of this week, dragging the iPhoto library in Photos over to the Dropbox folder (do this with iPhoto closed and then double-click once moved to let iPhoto figure out the new location.) I did a selective sync to another computer that was lacking in hard drive space so that the Dropbox sync wouldn’t eat up all the space.

Finder claims there are about 98,000 in the library. Dropbox was indexing about 360,000. I haven’t dug into the discrepancy, but I’m guessing hidden files aren’t in the Finder count. 

 Setup:

MacBook Pro mid-2009 model, 8 GB RAM, 1 TB 5400 RPM HD, 50/10 Mbps Cable Internet service through TWC. 

 Tweaks:

Default setting for Dropbox upload is to “Limit automatically” (as shown below) to minimize disruption to other Internet activities. I had to change that to “Don’t Limit”.

As of Saturday (3 days later):

I’ve also done a disk clone of the of the 1TB and gotten caught up on Time Machine backups, but three days later, Dropbox has indexed half of the files and uploaded 10GB of data. 

 As of Monday (5 days later):

Dropbox is down to only indexing its last 18,000 files (5.6%) and has uploaded roughly 85 GB of data.

As of Wednesday (7 days later): Dropbox appears to have backed up 160 GB of data, but it also appears to have crashed at some point along the way as well.