dweingartner asked: In your TUAW post "Time Machine plus a clone secure the day" you say that "Dropbox saves every file change for the past 30 days..." Do you do that by having your Dropbox folder be a SmartFolder with a "last modified within 30 days" filter? Or is there a better method? Thanks. Dave

It’s really better to ask questions and comments on TUAW but what I meant was that Dropbox saves any changes you make to any file in your Dropbox for 30 days.

Let’s say that Time Machine runs at 10:00 am and I create a new Word document at 10:01 a.m. I work on that file from 10:01 am until 10:45 am. and hit “Save” every 5 minutes, meaning that there were about 8 different “versions” of that Word file. Each of those revisions is saved on Dropbox’s website. Automatically. In the background. Without me having to use CVS or SVN or anything like that.

It’s like having an “undo” that will work for 30 days, across different computers, and even if I close the file.

Now imagine that I’m cleaning up some files and accidentally delete that new document (and empty the trash) at 10:59. As far as Time Machine knows, that file never existed, but I can “un-delete” it from Dropbox.

That’s why my most-frequently changed files are stored in Dropbox and Simplenote, because they are backed up frequently.

SuperDuper for daily backups.

Time Machine for hourly backups (although it does more than that)

Dropbox/Simplenote for frequent, off-site backups of highly valued data.