I found out not everybody knows about Dropbox yet and isn’t using it yet. So to sort that out, I’m going to blab about it right here cause I think it’s pretty damn neat. In short Dropbox allows you to sync files from your local PC’s by installing a small client app on your machines. You get a “My Dropbox” folder in your “My Documents” folder and everything you dump in there gets uploaded to the dropbox servers, and automatically downloaded on all other PCs where the client is also running. Viola! You’re machines are now perfectly in sync!
You get 2 gigabytes of free space so you can share some pretty big files that way too, or you can use it as a small off-site backup system. There’s no size limitations so you can waste the full 2 GB on a single file if you like.
Here’s some more cool stuff you can do with your Dropbox account:
- Share uploaded files using direct links. No adds, no fuss, just a direct link to the file to download.
- Share a whole folder with someone else’s Dropbox account. Allows for easy collaboration. Neat.
- Dropbox keeps a 30 day delete/change history of your files. So you can download a previous version of a file, or undelete it. It’s like a mini-source control system.
- Access your files from the website without the need to install the Dropbox client software. Handy in case you want to access a file from a computer where you can’t or don’t want to install the client.
- It’s secure. You files are encrypted with your account password on the server so even the Dropbox folks can’t see what they are and uploads go over an encrypted channel so peeping Toms get no idea either.
- It’s multi-platform. Linux, Mac, Windows and even the bloody iPhone. Go figure.
See the full list of features if you think this sounds pretty sweet and if you join up using this referrer link you’ll be giving me an additional 250MB for my own account, which is also pretty damn sweet. Thanks!
Photo by helgasms!, cc-licensed.