Dropbox

Dropbox is a funky new toy I’ve been playing with under Ubuntu but it also works on pretty much any Linux flavour, as well as Windows and Mac.

It’s a file synchronisation program, and one of the simplest I’ve found to use. The free package gives you 2Gb of on-line storage and the little program that runs in the background synchronising things uses very few resources.

Download, install and (in the case of Ubuntu anyway) log out/in to trigger the background process. Register an account and let the program know where your “dropbox” folder should be stored. That’s it.

Linux has one major advantage over Windows in that you don’t have to store all the files you wish to keep synced in a particular folder. Use any old folder for your Dropbox and drag/drop virtual links to other folders into it. These folders will then be read and their contents stored on Dropbox’s servers. Make any changes, add files, delete them… and very quickly these changes will be reflected on the main site.

Updates are logged and a full history is available on your profile page.

A Public Files folder is located in your Dropbox. Any files here are, obviously, publically browseable. In addition, a simple right-click and menu selection will put a URL into your clipboard. Paste this on an email or wherever and the recipient will be able to click on it to get a copy of the document from the Dropbox servers.

I’ve not made big use of programs like this in the past, but for offline storage, file sharing and synchronising between two or more machines it’s an excellent little tool.

If you do download it, pretty please do so via this link – that way I stand a chance of getting my 2Gb storage upgraded for referring you!