The Importance of Saving to Dropbox

Kibin requires all editors to save their in-progress and recently finished edits to a shared Kibin Dropbox folder. Rest assured that using Dropbox is secure, and the only files shared with Kibin admins are those saved to your Kibin folder. 

Technical issues can and will happen (but not often, we hope), and Dropbox keeps us prepared. You never think it’ll happen to you until we’re saying, “This could have been avoided if we had a copy on the cloud.” Imagine this scenario:

You're putting the finishing touches on a 65k-word PhD thesis when your 8-year-old laptop makes a pitiful whirr and goes black. Frantically, you jam the power button because two weeks of editing work is due in two hours. Turns out, your hard drive is toast, and you didn't back up your file like you intended. You realize that you’ll have to redo the entire document in about half the time. After all, it's your duty to help the author meet their deadline instead of dashing their dreams of becoming a doctor... not to mention you'd really like to see payment for all that hard work. If your in-progress edit had been saved to your Kibin Dropbox folder, you could have had the file back lickety-split, no extra work needed. (This, unfortunately, is based on a true story.)

Dropbox also has your back if, for any reason, your edited document doesn't make it from your computer into our system. Here’s another scenario that happens more often than you’d think: A user notices their order wasn’t returned on time and emails to ask what’s up. We see their doc timed out in your queue and attempt to contact you for an ETA. You actually finished the edit yesterday, but the browser glitched during submission as you rushed to close the tab because you needed to pack for vacation. The finished file wasn’t saved in your Dropbox folder, and you’re now unreachable on an inflatable pool flamingo in the Bahamas. We end up editing the late order in a rush instead of quickly re-uploading the meticulously-edited text you already completed. Don’t underestimate the importance of Dropbox!

Setting up your Dropbox folder

1. Sign up for or sign into your Dropbox account. Click the “Create” button at the top of your Dropbox home screen and select “Shared folder.” 

2. Name the folder using your first name, last initial, and -Kibin. Type team@kibin.com in the To field and select “can view.

3. Click "Done." You should now see the “TK” icon in the upper-right corner of the folder.

Saving to Dropbox

Setting up the folder is the easy part; now you have to use it. The folder can't save the day if it’s empty! Every time you download a document from Kibin, you should save the file to your Kibin Dropbox folder immediately (instead of to your desktop or to another folder on your computer). That way, you know it's on the cloud as you work on it. 

If you’re a Windows user, it’s even easier to save from Word because you can add Dropbox to your list of “Places.” Follow these instructions to add your Dropbox folder shortcut, which will look like this: 

One last thing -- A copy of your edited document lives in the Kibin system after a successful submission, which means you don't need to keep past edits in Dropbox forever. Just to be safe, though, we ask that you wait two weeks before deleting a document you’ve submitted successfully.

What are you waiting for? Set up your Dropbox folder today!