Meewella | Fragments

The Life of P

Dropping the Box

I’ve had a Dropbox for a while but haven’t written about it because I couldn’t work out what to do with it. There are a bunch of services that offer cloud storage (SkyDrive offers a generous 25GB for free) accessible from anywhere and dwarfing Dropbox’s meagre 2GB (unless you pay $10/month) but Dropbox’s key advantages are ease and automatic synchronisation across multiple machines. Essentially on installation you identify a folder on your computer and then anything you drop or edit in there gets synchronised first to the cloud and then to any other computers on which you’ve got it installed. Syncing data between my desktop and laptop just got a lot easier.

Another neat trick is to move your Firefox profile into your Dropbox. This way all your browser settings — including all your extensions — are kept in sync on every machine. You could even keep a whole suite of synced Portable Apps. A big one for me was putting all of the design files for this website in there, so if I update from my laptop while on the move, I don’t need to worry about remembering to copy the changes over to my desktop. The other nice feature, even for those with just one PC, is that any file you want to share is available via a standard URL which you can give to anyone, with or without a Dropbox account. They don’t need to sign in or download zip archives, just click to view or listen. Give it a go (that link will also give you an extra 250MB storage) and I’d love to hear interesting uses anyone else comes up with.

And in unrelated news our dear poet laureate has composed a poem titled “Achilles” based on David Beckham’s ankle injury. While it’s true that I am swiftly won over by the classical and the mythic, I do think it’s kind of not awful. Rather neat, even.

3 Comments

  1. Can’t remember where I read this, but Dropbox is also great for personal wikis. If you use a wiki client that’s a html file or similar, and save it in Dropbox, you can edit it in Firefox and it’ll update in Dropbox when you save it.

    It’s an impressive piece of kit.

  2. Finally something I have a load of experience with!! Dropbox has been massively useful for me this year as most of the work I’ve been doing has been group based. So dropbox is perfect as a central storage.

    It’s also awesome that files automatically update but you can refer back to earlier versions (which came in very useful today!) Considering it is free, it gets a thumbs up from me for its ease of use and it has genuinely made my life easier as far as uni work is concerned.

  3. Thanks for the suggestions, guys.

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"Civilization now depends on self-deception. Perhaps it always has."

(CC) BY-NC 2004-2023 Priyan Meewella

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