Dropbox describe themselves as the ‘easiest way to share and store your files online’, and they’re not far wrong.
You simply install a small Dropbox client on your computer (available for Mac, Linux, and Windows), which runs in the background. This’ll give you a Dropbox folder, which is where the magic happens. Drop any files into this folder, and they’ll be whisked across the internet and synced to Dropbox’s servers. If you make a change to any files in your Dropbox folder, the changes will be synced automatically (and just those changed bytes are transferred – which is really nice if you work with big files). And, because these changes are tracked, Dropbox does version control on your files – you have access to every version/change that you’ve uploaded! Accidentally deleted your important report? Never mind, grab yesterday’s copy! So, if nothing else, this is a nice way to seamlessly backup your files remotely. But what if you want to access them from another computer?
If you install the Dropbox client on another machine, your changes will get pulled down to that computer. Then, any changes you make on either machine will get pushed across to the other one – two folders on two different computers, both exactly in sync, without you having to do a thing!
What if you’re on a machine that doesn’t have Dropbox installed? Simple – you can use the fancy-pants web interface to access all of your files. There’s even have an iPhone-optimized version, so all your files are available on the go.
And how about sharing these files? Well, you have shared folders – you can either add other Dropbox users as collaborators (so the files will be synced to their computers) or for non-Dropbox users you can simply send them a hyperlink to a file, which they can download through their browser. If you send a link to a folder of photos, Dropbox will give it a photo gallery web interface!
It all seems very secure, too – files are AES 256 encrypted, and transferred using SSL. Dropbox opened to the public back in September 2008. You get 2GB of storage for free, and if you want more it’s around $99 a year for 50GB. For more information, take a look at a tour of Dropbox and the video on their homepage.
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