We here at Arekibo sometimes take the opportunity of the peace and quiet of home to work on designs, documents, reports, etc. Up until now this meant either making sure we have a copy of the relevant files on our laptops or memory keys, or that we email those files to ourselves. Sometimes (more often than is convenient) you leave that all important document either on your desktop in work, or worse, on your desktop at home.
Now, come to the rescue, is the multiplatform Dropbox (http://www.getdropbox.com/). This is a small application that you install on all your computers (even on your iPhone… if you have an iPhone… it is accessible through other mobile devices providing you have web access on them) which creates a centralised cloud based folder. Adding a file into the Dropbox folder on your work desktop makes that file immediately available to you on any of your other computers. There is no syncing required as a change made to a local file is registered by the folder and automatically synchronised with each of your other machines. My personal computer is a Mac and using this system I can drop a word document/photoshop file/php snippet of code into my Dropbox folder, come into work and open the Dropbox folder on my PC desktop and the files are there for me to access. Simple. No having to get the latest version or making sure they are sync’ed. They’re just there. There is also a “Public” sub folder and by dropping a file in here, I can get a web URL for the file, in case I need to email it or IM it to someone who doesn’t have a Dropbox account. This is a much more convenient way of transfering larger files to clients than email.
Of course there is a sign up process, but this is one of the most painless I have come across in a long time as the signup is part of the installation process. Your account is free up to 2GB of storage and there are pay monthly options to avail of more space (2GB is fine for what I typically need). There’s a really good tour on the site too so you can have a quick look and see if this will do it for you.
I have to say from a personal perspective, this is one of the most useful applications to come out in years. I can’t recommend it highly enough!
Check it out at: http://www.getdropbox.com
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Ah!!! at last I found what I was looking for. Somtimes it takes so much effort to find even tiny useful piece of information.
Nice post. Thanks