Now that I’m on a rant about “keepin’ things simple”, I thought I’d share an amazing little product that I was introduced to recently. I’ve been on the hunt for a little while for a clean, simple, and cost-effective way to store my electronic files in a place that would allow me to access them from anywhere.
If you do a google search for online file storage, you’ll fine a whole host of characters that offer some variation of online file storage. But all were lacking something for me. The problem with most was that if I didn’t have an internet connection, I couldn’t access the files I stored on those remote servers. The only workaround was to double-save everything…once to the remote server and once to my local hard drive. Until now…
Enter the new love of my life called Drop Box. Drop box is one of those little things that so good at what it does, you don’t even know it’s doing it’s thing. What it does is creates a folder on your computer called the DropBox. You can put this folder ANYWHERE on your computer that your pretty little heart desires.
Then, anything you put into your DropBox on your local hard drive gets AUTOMATICALLY uploaded to Drop Box’s servers. This way, if I’m ever away from my own computer but have internet access from another machine, I just log into my account at http://www.GetDropBox.com and I have access to all of my files.
But wait…it gets better. Let’s say that I’m working on a colleague’s computer and download something from my online Drop Box account…oh, I don’t know, say a spreadsheet (big surprise). When I’m done editing the spreadheet, like a good little boy, I’ll of couse put it back where I found it (i.e. push it back up to Drop Box’s site). The magic is that the next time I turn my PC on and connect to the internet, DropBox knows INSTANTLY that a file online has changed AND it automatically pushes it down to my local computer hard drive. Real time, automatic, and lightnin’ fast synchronization.
The cherry on top is that you can have multiple computers sharing file synchronization. Did you hear that TEAMS? You can have several users with the same information synchronized across everyone’s machines. If any user changes any file, whether it’s on their local machine or uploaded to DropBox’s servers, ALL users’ PCs will automatically be updated with the current version.
And for now anyway, you get all this for the low, low price of zero. That’s right…for up to 2Gb (the last time I checked anyway) you get their service for free. If you are a space hog, you can upgrade to a whopping 50Gb for $10/month or $100/year. Well done Drop Box.
Chris, nice to have you back in writing spirits. We have all missed your words of wisdom in a blog. My commitment will be to read your weekly blog and occassionally, leave a reply.
Chris,
It is good to have your writing. I have not read your blog in the past, but will this year. I enjoy your classes and hope to get more good wisdom from the blog.
Thats a great Idea to back up when your away from your back up external drive.
I am going to try it.
Richard