Online file sharing service Dropbox has surpassed 2 million users. The San Franciso company was one of last year’s finalists for the TechCrunch 50 awards. I mention this because I think Dropbox is a highly useful application that anyone not using it should know about.
What is Dropbox? I think this is one of the companies biggest issues, it is somewhat hard to explain to new users. However, I think the simplest way to think of it is as a “virtual” usb drive.
Say you have one computer at home and one at work. You would download the Dropbox application to each one. That would give you a folder called My Dropbox on each machine. Now say it is five o’clock and you are ready to leave the office, but you are not done with a spreadsheet that is due tomorrow. Well, with Dropbox, you would save the spreadsheet to your My Dropbox folder, where it would then sync to your home computer. When yo got home, you would open the My Dropbox folder on that machine, and there is your spreadsheet.
Your information is also synced to your own online storage space, so the program is also a backup utility.
Further, you can use it to share files by ‘inviting’ your friends to access certain parts of your Dropbox folder.
Dropbox comes in both free and paid versions. There is much more detailed information about how to use the service available at their website.
