How to put Dropbox in the Windows context menu. Oh, and what Dropbox is

Someone on Twitter men­tioned Dropbox, a won­der­ful file stor­age service. Thanks for the tip. I used to use the Gmail Drive app on my home and office com­put­ers to move files between them, but Dropbox is a lot more convenient.

In short, Dropbox lets you:

  1. Store up to 2 GB of your files on their server for free.

  2. Get at them through a spe­cial app from your home and work com­put­ers, and from any­where through the web interface.

  3. Stop wor­ry­ing about losing those files if your hard drive “dies”.

  4. Open the files for edit­ing from any pro­gram and not sweat over which ver­sion is saved where.

  5. Easily share selected files with every­one or with a par­tic­u­lar group of people.

The only incon­ve­nience I’ve found is that the Dropbox app for Windows doesn’t yet build itself into the con­text menu of that same Windows.

Still, that’s easy to fix, either by installing a special plugin (which I haven’t tested, sorry), or like this:

  1. Go to C:\Documents and Settings\Your_User_Name (often it’s Admin).

  2. Find the “SendTo” folder there.

If you don’t see one, look at the top of the window and find the menus “File”, “Edit” and so on.

Go to “Tools” → “Folder Options” → “View”, select “Show hidden files and fold­ers”, then Apply and OK.

  1. Now that you should be able to see the “SendTo” folder, put a short­cut to the “My Dropbox” folder in it, or to other fold­ers inside Dropbox, the “Public” folder, for example.

  2. Voilà! :)

P.S. This is about Windows XP, in case you were wondering.

P.P.S. By the way, if you sign up for Dropbox through the link above, I’ll get extra stor­age space ;)