by Kris Traughber
Imagine this. You’re on a business trip. You’ve got your laptop with you but you forgot some important files at home on your desktop computer. Then, to top it off, you can’t login to your sales application because you’re getting some weird error message. So you call your corporate help desk (or your personal tech guy) and he asks you to send him a screen shot of the error message. You remembered that you had a screen shot tool installed on your computer at home, but that does you little good here. That’s where Dropbox comes in. It is a virtual Swiss Army knife for your computing life and I’ll show you several ways to use it.
What is Dropbox?
It is an internet storage service that allows you to upload files to the internet and keep them synchronized between multiple computers. There are other similar services out there, but none works as smoothly as Dropbox. You just install the Dropbox software on each computer you want to keep in sync and then move files to the Dropbox folder on your computer. Those files are instantly uploaded and securely stored on the Dropbox website. When you look in your Dropbox folder on your other synced computers, you’ll see those same files there. (Just know that the more files you add to the Dropbox folder the more time it will take to sync. But it’s usually very quick.)
How much does it cost? How about free? Can you afford that? When you sign up, you get 2 GB of space for free. That’s plenty for most people’s basic needs. However, they also have paid plans that give you even more space. We’ll explore one use below where that comes in handy.
Sounds simple, huh? It is simple and even more powerful than it sounds. Let’s see how.
File Versioning and Backup
When you put something in your Dropbox, it retains 30 days of history on every file you store. This can be very handy. Let’s say you’re working on a document and you really screw something up. You can login to the Dropbox website and view the history of that file and revert it back to any point within the past 30 days. A new version is saved every time you save that file. You can also buy extra space starting at 50 GB for $9.99 per month and then you could use it to backup just about everything, knowing that there would always be an instantaneous backup of what you’re working on. That could be a major part of your backup solution.
Sharing Files
Your Dropbox folder has a special folder in it called Public. Everything you put in that folder is shared with the world. However, it’s not likely anyone would know how to get to it directly. Therefore, each file has an associated public link. You can give that link to anyone and they can access that file directly as long as it stays in the Public folder. You can get this public link by either going to the Dropbox folder on your computer or logging in to your Dropbox account on the web. In the example below, let’s say I created a video for someone showing them how to do something on their computer. I just save that video to my Public folder, copy the link to that file, and email it to them. I have used this technique many times whenever sending screenshots of errors to tech support. Remember, if you take that file out of your Public folder, they will no longer be able to access the file using the link you sent them.
You can also share any folder in your Dropbox regardless if it’s in your Public folder or not. The catch is that the person you’re sharing it with also has to have a Dropbox account. The folder that you share will appear in their Dropbox folder and will count towards their storage quota. So be careful if you decide to share your music collection with someone.
Photos
When you create subfolders inside your Photos folder it automatically creates online galleries that you can share with other people. In order to share these galleries, you copy the public link in the same way you do for individual public files.
Other uses
There are tons of other uses for Dropbox that you probably couldn’t imagine. To see some of them, go to the Dropbox Wiki site or just Google “uses for Dropbox”. Here are just a few.
- Host a static website. Just put the HTML pages in your Public folder and share the public link to the main HTML page.
- Store portable applications that you can run from any computer.
- Sync your passwords across computers using KeePass.
Many applications that have libraries or configuration files can be synced between computers using Dropbox. From the folks asMashable, another good tip is to use watch folders.
“Any application that lets you create a watch folder is fertile ground for Dropbox. Here’s an idea: if you’re a Photoshop user, create a watch folder in Dropbox, leave your powerful PC running Photoshop at home. Then, when you drop a photo into that folder when you’re on the road, it’s automatically processed to the dimensions you designate back at the mother ship. You can also use this idea for BitTorrent, dropping torrents into a watch folder and having them download on your home machine while you’re at work.”
There are also third party apps that you can download that interact with and/or use Dropbox to do even more incredible things.
Give it a try
If you try some of these Dropbox tips as well as the many others that are just waiting to be discovered, you’ll be glad you found Dropbox. So go download Dropbox at http://dropbox.com. See if you can come up with tips of your own and let us know in the comments.