For years I have lauded Dropbox as my one-stop shop for all of my limited backup, file organization and access, and even podcast hosting needs. But for the first time since 2009, Dropbox made a decision that I did not like at all. 

Dropbox announced earlier this year that they would be ending support for the Public folder in favor of shareable links. The Public folder inside of your Dropbox was originally the place to share public links - files that you wanted anyone with that link to have access to - such as MP3 files for podcasts. 

I've written about it before, but being the cheap person I am, I opted to host all of my podcast files for Ministry Bits inside of the Public folder in 2014 when I got started. Making the files Public enabled me to be able to have them in a podcast feed on my Squarespace site, but also allowed for direct streaming of those MP3 files without having to download them. 

Now, this is mostly my fault for not being on top of this, but I guess I missed the email from Dropbox saying that support would end on September 1. When it did end, my podcast no longer functioned. People couldn't download or stream episodes in any podcast app nor could they even listen directly at the feed here on my Squarespace site. 

I'm angry for two reasons: 1) Because I wasn't paying attention, people can no longer access my podcast until I fix it, and 2) Why would Dropbox end support for a feature that's so widely used? Look on any of the Dropbox forums and you'll hundreds of people who aren't happy about this. 

But all that being said - it's happened, it's done, and it's time to move on. 

I've looked into lots of Podcast hosting services this week, and none are as cost effective as Dropbox. For $9.99 a month, I get 1TB of storage, more than I will ever use or need (currently only using about 49GB). But now with the Public folder gone, a lot of the functionality that I relied on is gone. 

If I was starting a new podcast, I would happily pay for Fireside.fm. It's an excellent all-in-one management system for your podcast. However, the way I wanted to integrate my files with my Squarespace account simply wasn't going to work. 

There's other services like the popular LibSyn and PodBean, but both have pretty small storage caps per month (LibSyn is 50MB per month for $5). So importing all 58 episodes of Ministry Bits would not be possible. 

So I turned to Amazon S3. S3 stands for super simple storage, and it does a pretty good job. I've hosted files there before - like the AIM Series videos for the Apple TV app. But never really did think about it for my podcast. 

The best thing about S3 is that it's very cheap, and you only pay for what you use. Right now I'm paying about 24 cents a month to host 6-8GB of files and pay for the bandwidth when those files are streamed/downloaded. So since audio files are much smaller (about 30-40MB each) and the bandwidth to stream them is much lower, I expect I won't be paying more than 50-60 cents each month when all is said and done. 

If you have an Amazon account, you can sign into S3. It's a little less user-friendly than Dropbox or Google Drive, but it's cheap, it hosts and streams my files, and I don't have to worry about them sunsetting a feature that will disable my podcast. 

I'll continue to host text files and other small files on Dropbox, but for all my public files with audio and video, I'll be using S3 from now on. 

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It's always cool to see other people's home screens - it's like peering into their living room. So I present my current home screen. What I'm using and how I'm using it. 

First of all, I don't have folders on my home screen. Why? I think a home screen should be reserved for those apps that one uses every day. I want to get to the info or app when I want to as fast as possible. 

Starting with the dock, I use a three-app setup for the apps I use the most: Silo, Calendars 5, and OneNote. 

Silo is an excellent To-Do list app and has a native iPad and Mac app as well, which is essential for me. You can make multiple lists and Silo's signature feature is sharing those lists. This app is great for task management within groups. 

I've raved about Calendars 5 from Readdle. Lots of people love Fantastical, but I prefer Calendars 5 because it just works best for what I need. I need to see a month a time in meetings and talking to people about scheduling, and I need to do it quickly. C5 offers that and a very quick entry of new events into my calendar. 

OneNote has become my default app for everything. I love the design, I love the updated iOS apps, and I love how it handles documents to and from devices (it maintains layouts and fonts across all platforms). It's a great project management tool - not just for notes. 

Back up to the top, I use the Ascend Federal Credit Union app to keep track of my bank account. It's a small local bank here in Tennessee but have just added mobile check deposits through the apps. Nice. 

I use the standard Apple Maps app because it has pretty good integration with iOS. The Weather Channel is also pretty standard, but their recent iOS 7 update made it way more like Yahoo Weather, except with the accuracy of The Weather Channel. 

Scanbot has become a new favorite of mine for scanning documents with my phone, which is surprisingly great. You would think that would be cumbersome, but it's not. 

Tweetbot is my Twitter client of choice. It is magnitudes better than the standard Twitter app. I love the user muting feature - comes in handy when you've got those people that you follow that tweeting just a little too much. 

Paper has actually made me like Facebook again. It's a real pioneering app that uses "sloppy swiping" to navigate. It works really well and I like this Facebook app a lot better. 

Reeder is my RSS reader of choice, and I sync through Feedly. I don't have a ton of feeds, but it's nice and handy when standing in the checkout line and you can quickly skim your feeds. 

Dropbox is a staple. While I don't have as much storage space on DB as I do with Google Drive or Box, I still find it more useful and less irritating than other services. 

Mailbox is my favorite email client on iOS. It's basically email triage. I talked about this app on episode 16 of Ministry Bits. I have it set to display a numbered notification badge on the app if there's messages in there, so for me it's almost like a task list, because I know if I see a badge there that I need to act on something. I hear there's also a Mac app in the works as well. 

1Password is probably my most essential app. While not cheap, I know that my passwords are secure and every one of them is unique and very difficult to break because I have this app. You have a master password to unlock the app, and then you can copy any of those password into other apps or other sites using the built-in and very capable browser. 

Pedometer++ is great for tracking your steps every day. It's simple and effective. 

Instacast is my podcast catcher of choice. It's great, and I use it on iPad as well. You can subscribe to podcasts directly within the app, and download podcasts for later viewing. 

The ESV Bible is the simplest Bible app out there, and it's the version I prefer. 

Evernote I mainly use for taking pictures and scanning business cards, all of which are searchable. Evernote can be used for lots of things, but that's what I use it for. 

Last but not least, Day One is a journaling app that I use to keep track of what I've done - as a youth minister I need accountability, and I log every event from phone calls to conversations I've had to ball games I go to. It comes in handy if I ever need to remember what I did on a particular day. 

So that's it! Let me know if you would like YOUR home screen featured on the site. We'd love to see your home screen!

Ten or fifteen years ago, you could have gotten away with not backing up your computer. Digital photos and great smartphone cameras we're quite common yet, we still used paper for things, and with the exception of a few things, our lives weren't yet totally on our computers. Fast-forward 15 years, and here we are with portable computers in our pockets. We have thousands upon thousands of digital photos and videos. We communicate through email and messaging. We live on social networks. 

And very few of us back all that data up. 

One out of every two computer users (which is pretty much everyone) will have a negative computer event in their lives every year. That could mean a computer crashing, a hard drive failing, or some natural disaster like flood or fire taking out your digital devices. 

The cardinal rule with backups is three backups on every machine - two on-site and one off. That means you need to have a backup, a backup for your backup, and an off-site backup (either on another HD at another physical location or through a service online like Crashplan). 

But most of us won't do it, because we're too busy to do it and too lazy to figure it out. And one day, it will cost you. 

Don't let 2014 be the year that you lost everything. 

With the cheapness of hard drives these days (even ultra-fast Solid State Drives are coming way down in price) you can get a lot of storage for not a lot of money. 

First, identify your needs. If you're a grandparent and have a bunch of documents to keep up with, but not a lot of photos or videos, then you probably don't need a Drobo storage array with 10 terabytes of storage. If, on the other hand, you're like me and you have small children and a wife that documents their every move, then you may need a 2 terabyte drive to backup all those photos and videos. Those are things you can't get back. 

Determine the size of your computer and devices. If you have a 500 gigabyte HD on your main laptop or desktop at home, using an external hard drive to store your photos isn't considered a backup. You need those files somewhere else. Make copies of all your important stuff (documents, photos, videos) and have them on a separate HD that you update on a regular basis, like every week. Keep that HD in a waterproof and fireproof safe for extra security. 

Utilize off-site services. All of my documents are stored in Dropbox because I have referred enough people to the service that I have ample storage space for project files, Photoshop documents, Word and Excel files, and other things. I know that my computer could be absolutely destroyed and I could fire up Dropbox on another computer and my files would be there. But I don't ever trust services fully either - I make a copy of my Dropbox folder to an external HD every month on top of my weekly backups. As far as photos and videos, you need a copy of those on an external HD, but you can also utilize services like Flickr and Shutterfly as an off-site backup for your photos and YouTube and Vimeo for videos. One bit of advice on that: don't use new services. Only use services that have been established. You don't want to put all your eggs into one basket and have that service go bankrupt or fail. Just ask users of Everpix what I'm talking about. 

Make it happen. Write it on the calendar, put a note on the fridge - do whatever you have to do to make a regular backup of your computers and devices. Most devices will back up to your computer and then you can, in turn, restore them from that backup. Most HDs offer plug-and-play features to where you can just plug the HD in and it does its thing to make a full backup. And if you can't figure it out, find someone who can or watch a YouTube video about it. 

Again, don't let 2014 be "that year we lost all our family photos." 

Back up. Today. 

I am sitting here as I write this post typing on a new Macbook Pro with a Retina screen. You've seen a Retina screen before - any iPhone since the 4 has had one, so odds are, if you have an iPhone in your pocket, it has a retina screen.

One of the biggest drawbacks of the iPad mini was its lack of a retina screen. It has the same resolution as an iPad 2, only squeezed into a size that was almost 2 inches smaller. Lots of people love the smallness of the iPad mini, and some have even said that the iPad mini outsold the iPad 4 two to one. People really like it. 

Now the iPad mini has a retina screen, and the resolution on it is even better than the new iPad Air. I haven't seen one yet, and the word is that supplies this holiday season may be severely constrained, but this very well may be the best iPad for preaching, teaching and writing yet. 

Why? Because of text. 

Text rendering on Retina screens is extraordinary. And if you're a preacher, teacher, writer, or anything in between, you live in text. You take notes in text. You read and write in text. 

There are lots of great apps for the iPad mini out there - Simplenote and Editorial are a few of my favorites - that take complete advantage of the sharp, un-pixelated text rendering you find on a Retina screen. The best part is that the text rendering is built into the system, so as long as your app runs and has been updated for a retina iPad (which most of the have and are now required to by Apple), the text in any app will look crisp and clean. 

For example, in my workflow as a youth minister, I do a lot of writing, copying and pasting, reading, and presenting. I have all my notes in Simplenote (which has a really nice Mac app as well). I compose my lessons and sermons in Simplenote and they're automatically synced to my iPad mini. I can't wait to see what my words look like on a Retina screen, not to mention how much easier it will be to read while presenting. 

If you need to format your work and make it look great, Apple's Pages is also a great place to start. You can even print to several cloud-enabled printers using AirPrint. 

I won't be getting a Retina iPad mini immediately, but I'll definitely be checking them out as soon as I can. If you're in the market for a 7-inch tablet, the resolution on the Retina iPad mini is certain to please.