Online File Storage

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I've recently fallen in love with the idea that online file storage would be cool to setup for easily sharing files between my wife and a few friends computers. It's not uncommon I need to send a 20-30MB file, and email doesn't handle that well. Or sometimes I just want to make a file available quickly on a URL to a group of friends, or maybe even an album of photos.

Now I know there are services that already exist for emailing last files, and I own a web hosting business so I have plenty of webspace I can FTP a file to, and yes I know about Flickr and Facebook for sharing photos. But what I've discovered transcends all these pre-existing services when it comes to ease and integration into my computers user interface. With the drag of a file I can do all of the above thanks to the new service, Dropbox.

Dropbox seems to be based around the concepts of a versioning system like Subversion rather than your typical online storage. Files are stored locally and then synchronised immediately with the server upon changing, using diffs of the files instead of transmitting the entire file on each sync. Files even have revisions based on previous syncs, and you can recover deleted files too. Your Dropbox contains a Public directory allowing you to quickly share a file with anyone via URL, and it also contains a Photos directory where photos and directories within it immediately translate to albums and photos you can share using direct links.

Dropbox does it not only with features, but with grace. Syncs occur immediately and quickly, especially compared to other services like Apple's iDisk, and if you're transferring large files it's easy to find out how long it's estimated it'll take to sync. So in short I'm in love. Give it a go, Dropbox works on Windows, Mac and Linux.
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2 comments:

  1. I have fairly recently ditched DropBox for Live Mesh, the Microsoft equivalent. 5GB free and the ability to sync any directory anywhere on the computer (something DropBox couldn't do at least the last time I used it).

    mesh.live.com

    There's a Mac client that runs pretty well.

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  2. Yeah I actually tried out Mesh last week, me and a work colleague both tried getting it working. We had a lot of problems with things not working properly, on both Mac and PC versions. So I dropped it.

    I think it's 25GB free though, although you get a 25MB or 50MB file size limit?

    Overrall I found DropBox to be more stable, fast at syncing automatically and immediately, and the fact it's based on subversion and offers the revisions and undeleting is cool.

    Each to their own :).

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