Dropbox Perfect for…Everybody

If you’ve ever been at home and decided to forgo the night’s big game, eating, or sleeping in favor of catching up on work, you’ve been faced with a common problem: you don’t have your files on your home computer. To complicate things, your home computer might be a Mac, where at work you use a PC or a Linux box.

Had you known you were going to work tonight, whether by design or by force, you might’ve copied what you need to a flash drive, optical disc or just emailed them to yourself. But you didn’t.

What to do?



Get Dropbox for next time. Dropbox allows you to automatically sync your files to and fro, on the most widely used operating systems like MacOS 10.4/10.5, Windows XP/Vista, and a variety of Linux systems including Fedora Core 9 and Ubuntu 8.04 and 7.10.

Setup is easy: download the client, create an account, and select a folder to sync. From there you just move or copy what you want to backup/sync into the folder and Dropbox does the rest.

You can access your files locally in Windows Explorer/Nautilus/KDE/Finder, or through your internet browser. Synchronization is 2-way, in that whatever you change in the local folder is automatically uploaded to the Dropbox cloud, and whatever you change remotely is automatically sent to your local folder.

We’ve been playing with Dropbox, and so far we're impressed. Sharing folders is a great feature that helps us stay on the same page when collaborating on projects. And as a nice bonus, Dropbox keeps track of deleted files, and allows easy restoration. If there are multiple versions of a file, you can pick which one(s) to restore. It’s like our own personal source control software. Oh, and did I mention they give you 2GB of space?

The only drawback we’ve seen in our use of Dropbox is we can’t select multiple folders to track, but that’s a short term problem, as it’s a feature that should be implemented soon.

So if you’re still not convinced enough to try it, have a look at the video demo at http://www.getdropbox.com, or check out our software reviews.

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