Got files? Get Dropbox!

Twenty minutes before class you arrive on campus and in a mad dash you realize you did not print your assignment. Fumbling through your backpack, you also realize where your USB flash drive is – connected to the computer at home, or worse still connected to the computer in the library from the night before. Now you’re out of options and your grade is going to reflect it.

This is a typical scenario many of us may have experienced when trying to manage a wealth of important documents on easy to misplace, portable storage devices like USB flash drives. There is a better way and it is called Dropbox, available at www.getdropbox.com.

USB flash drives have been around since about 2000 and have become popular mostly over the past five years. Before that we were using CD-R media and even floppy drives. Remember those days? The benefit of USB flash drives is their size and portability. Another huge advantage is their size. Common sizes now are 8GB and 16GB, which can store thousands of documents!

The problem, however, is how easy they are to lose or forget. Go into any computer lab and you can usually find a pile of USB flash drives in a pile that people have left behind. Although they are relatively inexpensive, the data on these portal storage devices certainly is not.

Dropbox is an online storage service and is a solution to this problem. Best of all, it’s free!

Dropbox works by having you download and install a small application on your computer that runs in the background, monitoring a specific folder of documents. When a file is added or is changed, Dropbox uploads a copy of this file to the Dropbox servers on the Internet in the background, always keeping your documents folder synchronized with the Dropbox servers.

You can run Dropbox on more than one computer, and anytime a file is changed in one place it is automatically replicated to the other computers. This is great for large group projects, or for synchronizing your home and work computers.

Don’t install Dropbox on a public computer, however. For security reasons, you don’t want your files permanently synchronized onto a computer others may use. Instead, use the web interface at www.getdropbox.com to login to your account and view all of your folders and files. You can also upload new files directly from the website that will then get pushed down to your computers at home and/or work. When you are done, simply logout and leave no data behind.

The web interface to Dropbox provides some additional features as well. You can see a revision history of a file. For example, if you’ve made 10 changes to a file but want to go back to a past version of the file, you can see all changes and revert to any one of them. Accidently deleted an important file? No worries, Dropbox saves a copy of your deleted files that you can safely recover.

The web interface also gives you enhanced sharing features so that you can control what other Dropbox users you have authorized can see of your files. Have a group project? No problem, simply share a folder with your group members and you all can see the files on your own computer.

For iPhone users, Dropbox has a nice iPhone interface for Safari. Simply login to the website, and you have access to all of your files directly from your iPhone. Although you can’t modify them, you can view any supported iPhone document type, such as Word, PowerPoint and Excel. Coming soon is a native iPhone application, but very few details have been discussed.

All server communications are encrypted with SSL, so your data remains safe and private. Additionally, data stored on the Dropbox servers is encrypted with 256-bit AES. Your data couldn’t be safer.

Dropbox is available at www.getdropbox.com for free up to 2GB in storage. Additional storage is available starting at $6.99 per month. Forget carrying around your data; instead let your data follow you.