Dropbox: No-Nonsense Online Storage
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We live in a world where we depend on data. Often we run into situations where we are required to store, back up, share, synchronize, and collaboratively work on the same files. Dropbox is a brand new online service currently in beta that offers all of the aforementioned capabilities in a totally seamless solution: a no-nonsense online file repository. It does what it promises, its simplicity is a definite plus, and it just works.In this article we are going to review this new service. Unfortunately, at the time of writing
Dropbox is
invitation-only since its current project status is at the
public beta stage. But don't be sad; just keep asking your friends and relatives because chances are high that somebody is going to bless you with an invite. Each newly-invited member receives another 10 invitations so you can imagine a sort of exponential tree of growth.
All right, but how does it work? First of all, let's assume you have your invitation and you can sign up. Of course, after a few weeks or months as soon as Dropbox reaches the final release state this won't be a problem. You need to create a new account. Your username is going to be based on the e-mail address with which you signed up. Logging into your account permits you to perform numerous web-based actions.
Dropbox is composed of two distinctive sides: the web-based interface and the client application, also called Dropbox. We are going to talk about the functions that you can do through the web interface in a moment, but for now what's really the gem of Dropbox is the so-called client application. You can download it right away from the web interface, assuming you could log in.
After the client installation, a new folder will appear in your "My Documents" folder called "My Dropbox." The folder already contains some sample files but that doesn't matter. The point is that anything you place into that folder gets uploaded to the Dropbox servers and synchronized to all of the other clients if necessary; additionally you can enable public or private sharing of the files later on, as well as collaboratively work on them.
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