dydaktix

Wow. I can’t say more about Dropbox than the fact that it’s changed my life, in a tremendous way, probably equal to, if not more significant than when I received my gmail invite. I don’t remember when an app made such an impression on me.

Dropbox is a cloud-based storage app, that allows you to sync and share your files. Remember the now defunct Yahoo Briefcase? Imagine that, but easier to use, and on steroids, and it.just.works. 

Once you sign up for dropbox (online) and install the application, the app installs a folder on your computer (you can put it wherever you want). Anything you put in that folder (up to 2.0GB free) will automatically sync with the “cloud” and your data is stored in both locations. Add dropbox to another computer and it’ll automatically sync there there as well. Take it out of the folder, it’ll take it 0ff the server. Make a  change and it’ll make the change, and you can revert back to the older copy if you need to, as it only changes the data that you changed. (i.e. you have a backup of the file/document).

You can also share the folder with anyone you want. Want to send grandma a bunch of digital pictures and she’s not too computer saavy? Set dropbox on her computer, share your dropbox, and boom, the pictures are on her computer in her dropbox file and all she has to do is click on them to see them. 

Maybe you’re too cheap/poor/recession-adverse (like me) to spend $99/yr for MobileMe, but want to sync your data? Put your address book files, and your iCal files in dropbox, and point a shortcut back to the original folders and it will be in sync with whatever computer you have connected to dropbox. 

Oh, and dropbox is available for mac, windows, and linux, so you can transfer files between those computers as well. And because the files are stored both in the cloud and locally, you always have the data even without being connected to the internet. they even have dropbox portable, so you can install that on a USB drive, if you want to do that too. They use great servers and great encryption, so your data is secure, to boot. And if you’re willing to pay and/or need to back up a lot of data, you could pay $99/yr for 50GB of space, or  $199/yr for 100GB vs. $99/yr for MobileMe’s 20GB.

With my 2GB of space I’m using it to sync/back up:

Address book, iCal, my school work, my downloads, and all my important archived documents. This is the easiest free way to keep data redundant and safe, not to mention having my data in sync over multiple computers.

Did I pique your curiosity? Shameless plug here: Sign up by clicking here  and we’ll both get an extra 250mb of storage, so you’ll start off with 2.25 GB instead of 2.0GB, and I get an extra 250mb too!