Dropbox: Versioning and Thumb Drive loss Averted

Versioning and Memory are one of the most irritating things known to man. The advantage of everything being virtual is that both of these are taken care for you, unfortunately this is usually done in the most complicated and awkward ways possible. If not, you're charged through the teeth for the privilege.

So, entering here is Dropbox, it's a free web and desktop app which works with Windows, Mac and Linux that allows you to keep everything up to date and synced together. It's somewhat like MobileMe, done right, for free.

With a free account you get 2GB of storage, all kept offsite with revision control handled by the web app. Once you drop a file into the folder, the "dropbox" then it's uploaded to the site and you can access it everywhere.

Going back to how I opened this post, you may be wondering how it saves on both versioning and memory, for one, it provides you with a set of revisions to the file and where it was changed which is in turn uploaded to the web app, this can then be linked to, so others can download the file (saving on mail attachment size errors), on top of this it rather nicely supports folders, which stops you from having everything in one big, unorganised folder.

In terms of memory, it saves you carrying around thumb drives, I'm rather good at forgetting them, fortunately this is usually at home and for when you are just using a mass of small documents, like for example a project proposal this really cuts down on having to fire off excuses when the deadline is due and you stupidly left it in one place.

Not put to much consideration is the usefulness of it being inherently an offsite and distributed backup system - especially if you have more than one device setup, say your laptop, your desktop and on the web app.

The "Dropbox" syncs automatically, well, usually a few seconds after it is written too and uploads the data to the site, once this is done the file/folder is listed with a big green tick, and when it's being syncronised a blue set of two arrows turning around.

The great advantage to this is that it's free, unless you plan on using it for a crazy amount of space, or for your main backups, which you can buy up to 50GB for about $99/£56 per year.

I'm yet to try anything other than the Mac desktop app or the web app in Firefox 3, but I am hoping that it will gracefully degrade in IE6, which I am forced to use often.