Once more on Dropbox, a superb service for storing and syncing files

Still using file-sharing sites to send files that won’t fit in an email? Then Dropbox is coming to you!

Dropbox is a ser­vice for stor­ing files and sync­ing them between sev­eral computers. That is, it’s a ser­vice plus a spe­cial pro­gram that cre­ates a folder of the same name on your com­puter and makes sure every­thing you put there is neatly copied to the Dropbox server. 2 GB of space free, more for not much money.

You can learn more about the ser­vice by… googling it :)

And here’s some­thing useful from me:

• You can choose where the Dropbox folder lives. I put mine on the desktop.
• You can choose to sync only some folders.

So on my work com­puter, which other employ­ees use besides me, Dropbox “sees” only the fold­ers they need. “For the office”, for example.

How to get more free space in Dropbox:

• like me, share your referral link and get +250 MB of free space for each new user;
• con­nect your Facebook and Twitter accounts, plug the ser­vice through them and get +640 MB: https://www.dropbox.com/free
• you could also com­plete the developers’ quest and get +1 GB or more, depend­ing on your puzzle-solving skills. The quest is closed now, but there’ll surely be more;
• or you can just buy it: 50 GB for $10 a month.

I use Dropbox to store:

1. back­ups of impor­tant files;
2. doc­u­ments I need both at home and at work that aren’t text doc­u­ments or spread­sheets (there’s Google Docs for those);
3. a set of soft­ware to install straight away on a freshly installed oper­at­ing system;
4. photos and pic­tures for post­ing on social net­works and var­i­ous sites, in the “public” folder.

By the way, about the public folder. If you blog and need some­where to upload illus­tra­tions for your posts, the public folder in Dropbox is just the thing. Just don’t forget that if you delete a file from it, the link in your blog stops work­ing too.

You can also launch tor­rents remotely: “Working with µTorrent remotely via Dropbox”. Though I can hardly imag­ine who’d need that.

Dropbox’s downsides. I don’t see any real down­sides, which is why I’m so pleased with the service. A few things aren’t ideal:

1. It eats about 45,000 KB of RAM. On my feeble work com­puter you can feel it a little. Though I think it’s no prob­lem for most modern computers.
2. The down­load speed isn’t very high. Yesterday, for exam­ple, I waited quite a while for my 320 MB folder to download. I mean down­load­ing through the web inter­face: when Dropbox is installed, it syncs in the back­ground, of course, and there’s no problem.

In short: Dropbox will save you heaps of time that usu­ally goes on send­ing files between your dif­fer­ent com­put­ers, and will help pro­tect impor­tant files, even in a nat­ural disaster. Enjoy.