Dropbox is Sweet

By Jake • September 16th, 2008 • View Comments

Rich pointed me at this nugget yesterday.

Dropbox is a small utility that solves a major pain point you’re familiar with if you have more than one computer or you’ve ever needed to transfer files between computers.

At least once a week, I have to transfer files between my machines; this is an old problem we used to solve with floppy disks. Remember them? Then came CD burning, online file exchange/sharing, and USB sticks. These all have their place, and Dropbox adds another, dead-easy, fast way to share files between computers.

As an example, yesterday I needed to move the presentation for our OpenSocial session between my Mac and Ubuntu boxes. I installed Dropbox on each; it created a folder for itself in the home directory of my user. Then all I did was:

add files to that directory on my Mac . . .

. . . and they automagically appeared in the Dropbox directory on my Ubuntu box.

No fuss no mess.

When the contents of my dropbox change, I get a notification. The Mac version integrates with Growl, which is nice. It’s all very well designed and nicely executed.

Rich said “it’s like automated src control for files“. He’s right.

Aside from sharing between your computers, you can also share files publicly. They give you 2 GB, which seems a bit low, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they went with the Flickr model, i.e. adding a pro version for more storage.  In addition, the Dropbox website offers version management and restore for deleted files. Very cool.

I read about Dropbox months ago, but since it was in beta at that time, I didn’t pay it much attention. Well, they’re out of beta now, and if I had a stamp of approval, I’d use it here.


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  • I tried both FolderShare and DropBox and both could not work from within firewalls, Oracle blocks them as P2P services. That did not bother u?
  • I haven't tried DropBox on inside the firewall yet, but I guess that would make sense.

    Update: DropBox has a proxy preference, which I assume will work with firewalls/proxy servers.
  • Yup, I downloaded again and now it worked right off the bat, you are right they implemented the proxy-ing now.
  • OK so that must have been missing from the earlier beta versions. Good to know it's fixed now.
  • jack
    Jake,

    Any idea if Beehive (Oracle's next gen Collaboration Product) has anything similar?
  • No idea, drop me a note, and I can put you in touch with the Beehive product team. You can ask them directly.
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