Posted by: Lois Lindemann on: May 24th, 2009 
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Two months ago, if I’m honest, I’d have to say that my files were in a mess. I use two laptops (my school laptop and my own personal machine), plus a netbook. Sometimes I need to log in to a desktop at school. The two laptops have plenty of storage space, the netbook and my space on the school network, not so much. The result was that I carried around a portable hard drive and a load of memory sticks. I had a second hard drive for back-ups. Consequently I had different versions of various key files all over the place. To make matters worse, I had experienced a total failure on my old school laptop, at which point I realised that even my backups were not quite as organised as they should be.
I spent a lot of time wondering about ‘cloud’ storage. I dabbled with Google docs and also with placing some files in a folder inside my website, but neither solution was ideal. Basically, I didn’t want to end up being dependent on an Internet connection to get at my files. Then I discovered Dropbox, which seemed to be a perfect solution, so I decided to try it. I was a little nervous about trusting Dropbox with all my files, especially since it was still in beta, so I started with just a few files, but everything has gone smoothly. It’s solved all my file management problems and made my life so much easier.
How does it work?
Dropbox provides a personal, password-protected area to store files online, in the ‘cloud’.
The real beauty of Dropbox is that it doesn’t rely on a permanent connection to the Web. You can download the Dropbox software onto as many computers as you like. This creates ‘My Dropbox’, which is basically just a folder on your computer. Any files and folders in the My Dropbox folder synchronise with the online version automatically.
Since I have a copy of every file inside My Dropbox on each of my laptops, I’m not relying on an internet connection to get to my files, only to synchronise them. I can still work with my files if I’m offline; then the next time that I connect to the net, the online versions get updated.
I still use my laptops in the normal way, except that files magically appear and update every time I swap machines. When I use the eee-pc or someone else’s computer, I can still access all of my files by logging in to the website.
There’s more…
The website also saves deleted files and previous versions, so when I used one document as a template for a new one and forgot to save it with a new name (doh!), I just retrieved the old one.
Backing up files is now really easy. Since the files synch every time I switch the laptop on and connect to the net, I already have one backup, so I’ve chosen to just take a backup of My Dropbox onto a portable drive once a week. No, it’s not a perfect system, but it’s quick, easy and I’m comfortable with that level of security.
Since My Dropbox is just a folder, it’s easy to decide what goes in it (and consequently appears on any other computers) and what doesn’t. I’ve put My Dropbox into the My Documents folder. Any really personal stuff that I don’t want to appear on my school laptop stays in My Documents on my personal laptop, outside My Dropbox.
Photo albums are built in, so I can have instant access to all my pictures, not just the ones I’ve uploaded to Flickr.
What’s the catch?
As far as I can see, there isn’t one. If you want up to 2 Gb of storage it’s free. I quickly outgrew that, so I pay $9.99 a month for up to 50Gb of storage. (There is also an option to upgrade to 100Gb, but I can’t see myself using that much space.) Given the amount of time and hassle this has saved me, I’m more than happy to pay a few pounds each month, especially since the alternative involved shelling out for a third hard drive.
If you are interested in trying it, you might like to use this link, which offers 500Mb of extra storage for free ( to both you and me). No, I’m not recommending it to you in order to get extra space for myself (I’ve not even used half of my 50 Gb yet!), I’m recommending it because I’m really impressed with Dropbox, in fact I can’t recommend it highly enough.
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