My Mac friends have been shouting at me for being stupid and not using the Dropbox service to fix syncing problems, sharing problems and sharing files to friends. I did not feel the need, I do now, and boy was I stupid for not using it sooner. Here is my recommendation: Don’t be like me, and start using it now! Rather than later.
Source : http://www.getdropbox.com/
Go to the above URL, and get a dropbox account. Go to each computer that you own and set up dropbox for your Windows, Linux or Mac solution. Then go to the folder and make an alias for [Public] And drag it to your desktop.
Now, what happens? First of all, you can be on your Windows box and drop an mp3 in there, it will upload in the meantime. You can then either go to any of your other computers and double click the public folder from dropbox (or access it from the web!) and get that mp3 file (or any other file) once it’s been uploaded. Or, right click the file and select > dropbox > copy URL. And share it with your friends.
Benefits? What? You did not get that?
The benefits are that if you have files or data, media, etc that you can not share easily between systems, for example because of operating system sharing issues between Mac and Windows, then you can just dropbox it and access it from the other system.
Ok, an example. I have a program called info.xhead which stores all my personal logins encrypted. I want to have this on my new iMac, on the Mac Pro I drop it into dropbox and go to the iMac, and from within the program I select > restore backup. And it’s up to date. No need to use thumbdrives, burn to a cd/dvd or email myself or other “tricks”.
I did the same for my firefox bookmarks, documents that I wanted to backup, and some my garageband music file.
Another example, Skype file transfer was super slow on a 10MB .png file. I put it in dropbox and gave the guys on skype the link, they could all access the file and view it. After the skype call I just deleted the file to clean things up again.
If you have a program that can not sync properly, or need to quickly share files with friends, this is the solution in my eyes.
The only thing (and I have emailed them with the suggestion) that I am missing, and many others, is the ability to create a custom domain for it, or to have a totally public folder for others (can view indexing).
This way I could make something like public/mrfloris/ and set index to ‘anyone can view index’. And then IN A record to the IP dropbox gives me, or CNAME record to their host. And have something like files.mrfloris.com which I can easily share with friends, and looks more userfriendly to my friends. And yes, I am willing to pay for this.
Ok, that is it for now. Any questions? Just post them in the comments. Dropbox yourself and enjoy using files between multiple computers, multiple operating systems and even with friends, using cloud computing.
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