I’ve been a user of dropbox for some time now and I thought it might be worth writing a few words to say why I love the service and why I would recommend I using it or another cloud based file sharing service.

If you’ve never heard of dropbox let me just give a brief summary of what the service is and what it provides, I’ll try to not make mine and your heads hurt with an over technical description.

Dropbox is a file sharing / distribution service that uses an internet based server to distribute files between your linked devices such as computer, smart phones etc.

So with the example of a Windows PC, it creates a folder on the local hard drive, anything you place in that folder will get uploaded to the server and then any other pc’s you have connected to your account will automatically get a copy of that file and it will stay synchronised between your two PC’s and the server copy.

There are more uses but that is pretty much it in a nutshell, so here are my reasons why I think dropbox is a must have application at least for me.

1. Work Anytime / Anywhere

If your like me and you have more than one device that you work from, perhaps you have a laptop and a PC, maybe you have a PC and a Mac, or maybe you’re a dedicated Mac user but you have a desktop and a Mac laptop. Whatever the situation, if you work from more than one device I am sure you have the same issue as me, that you need your files accessible whatever device your on.

In the past this would have involved carrying around a USB memory device, or an external hard disk and having to copy files back and forth and make sure they are in synch, not to mention the issues of losing data through damaged devices.

With dropbox this is no longer an issue for me, I set up my dropbox account on any device that I use regularly, in my case a desktop PC and a laptop. I work on my application files directly from the dropbox folder and whichever machine I’m on I have the latest version of everything, effectively I just have the one version that’s constantly in synch.

2. Sharing With Others

Another thing you can do with dropbox is take a specific folder from within your shared dropbox folders and share it with other people. They need to sign up for their own account or you can recommend them to join. Once they are connected to dropbox you can share your folder with them. So you can collaborate on projects, or you can for example leave work for an employee / virtual assistant and they can put it back in your dropbox folder once it is completed.

You can also get access to the other persons folders so that you can collaborate on others peoples files/projects. Folders can be shared with multiple people, so you could even have a whole team with access to the same files at any time.

3. Distribution Between Platforms

One of the things I love about the service is that it is available for PC, Mac, iPhone and Android. So you can access and share files between any of the devices. That spreasheet that you create on your desktop, you can view through dropbox on your phone, your iPad, any device that dropbox supports.

Obviously the file you share has to be one that you can open and use on the other platform, but as long as the device can open the file format, the rest is taken care of.

4. Rolling Back and Recovering Files

If you accidentally delete a file or somehow corrupt the data of a file that is in your dropbox folder all is not lost. You can go to the dropbox website, log in to your account and review your file history, you can roll back files and you can recover deleted files. Deleted files will be recovered on the server and then sent back to each connected device as it logs into the service, very cool.

5. Easy Photo Sharing

When you install dropbox and set up your local folder you also get a special folder that is public access. You can place images in this folder and then distribute a web address to anyone that you would like to view those images. So you can make a photo album that you can then send to friends and family.

Obviously you shouldn’t put anything in there that you wouldn’t want anyone to potentially see as it’s a very public folder, but for a quick and easy photo sharing tool, it’s nice and simple to set up and use.

In Summary

As you can probably tell I am a big fan of dropbox, quite honestly I wonder how I ever managed without it. It’s scary how quickly something that you never had becomes an essential tool. There are other cloud based sharing sites out there and I’m not suggesting that they’re not as good, some of them are geared towards different markets such as music sharing etc. I just find that dropbox is the one tool that covers all my needs for distribution and access to my files.

A free account gives you 10 GB of disk space, the only thing to watch out for is if you join others people shared folders, the contents of those folders count towards your 10GB space. You can recommend friends and family to the service and for everyone that signs up you get an extra 0.25 GB space. You can also pay for additional space and at the time of writing this, 50GB costs 10 US Dollars a month.

If you found this article useful and want to sign up, please consider clicking through the links in this article as I will get a little extra disk space for each sign-up. As always all comments are welcome and if you have any questions, feel free to contact me using my feedback page.

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