Dropbox – My Experiences
About 10 or 12 years ago, there were a number of sites selling storage on the web. One of them I used for a while was XDrive.
At the time, I thought it was pretty cool. You could get up to 100 megabytes of storage for free! Courtesy of the Wayback machine at archive. org, here is what XDrive’s web site looked like back in 2000.
Here is what their web site looks like now. As you can see, they’re no longer in business. Myself, I stopped using them and their competitors after a while because in most cases, the interfaces were clumsy and really not all that easy to use. It became more convenient to use a flash or thumb drive, which were starting to get popular and less expensive.
That’s pretty much how I operated over the years. I would see other online storage operations come and go, and I didn’t pay much attention. About a year and half ago, I read about Dropbox and didn’t really think much of it at the time.
Recently, I was reading an article in MaximumPC magazine where they showed how to keep track of your passwords using a combination of the open source password tracker program KeePass and Dropbox.
In working through hows this should work, I decided to sign up for the basic 2Gb free Dropbox account.
After playing with Dropbox for a while, I actually paid for an entire year of 50Gb storage. What sold me on this was one feature. On any given day, I may be on as many as four or five different computers between work and home. Having that much storage in the “cloud” was great, but what if that cloud goes away?
Here’s the feature. On any computer you may use, you can install the Dropbox client and Dropbox will synch all your files to a Dropbox folder on that computer. Wait, it get’s better. As you make changes to the files or add or subtract from that folder, those changes are synched to all the other computers where you installed the Dropbox client.
If the computers are on the same network, Dropbox is intelligent enough to do the synch over the local network instead of going out and coming back in.
A good example of this is just the other day, I finally fixed the fan on my ThinkPad T42 and installed Windows 7 on it. I also installed the Dropbox client and within a couple of hours, the Dropbox folder on the ThinkPad matched all the other computers.
There are many other features, but this synch feature really sold me. For those who don’t want to synch, there is an web interface that functions very well.
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