Category: Computers

Now that I’ve been using it for a few days, I though I’d give you an update on Dropbox. And it’s all positive. It does a lot more than I realised when I first signed up.

First up, you don’t need to have the Dropbox applet installed to access your files. This is useful if you want to get at your documents when you’re on a public machine. You can upload and download files via a very simple web interface. Of course, the ideal situation is to have it installed and the applet seems to work perfectly on Ubuntu. It’s quick, registering changes to documents and replicating them online very swiftly.

Within Explorer, or whatever you use to browse your PC files, those which are replicated are clearly marked with a big green tick (I assume this is the same for non-Ubuntu systems). Context-sensitive options are added to these files which are worth checking out. Again, all of these can also be accessed via your account on the Dropbox web site.

One I spotted which could be incredibly useful is “revisions”. Every time you re-save a document, Dropbox backs up the last version so that if you’re made a huge mistake it’s really easy to recover an older backup. I don’t know if there’s a way of limiting the number of revisions or whether these take up any of your alloted space [update: no, they don’t – found the info on their FAQ] but it’s an excellent facility and one they should advertise more.

When you start up, Dropbox automatically creates two folders: Public and Photos. Anything stored in your Public folder can be accessed by anyone if you give them the relevant URL. This can be obtained via the web page, or by right-clicking on the file. Popping pics into the Photos folder will share them on your personal page on the Dropbox website in a gallery format. Simple as.

I’ve also tried the page on my Nokia E71 and it works pretty well. The only thing is that it’s the same layout as the default web page so there’s a lot of scrolling involved. I’ll feed this back to them.

Overall, I’m even happier with it than I was before. A great resource, especially if you only need a couple of gig and go for the free option. As before, if you’re interested then please sign up via this link as then I’ll get a little boost on my storage space. Chris did!

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!