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Dropbox: A shameless plug, and a review
Jan. 15th, 2011 01:37 amDisclosure of interest: Part of the reason I am writing this is because for every person who signs up to dropbox through me, I get a quarter of a gig more space on there, and that would be useful. However, I also think that it's a useful thing that will make people's lives easier.
Dropbox is one of those Cloud computing things that get mentioned every so often. The way it works is that on a computer, you download a program and link that to an online account. This program creates a 'dropbox' folder. Anything put into that folder will be uploaded to the Dropbox servers. Then, if you put a dropbox folder on a different computer, it'll download every last thing that's currently in the dropbox folder. You can also upload and download to it from any computer by signing in on the website. Two computers on at the same can pass things back and forth fairly quickly (depending on their upload and download speeds). You start off with 2GB for free, you can get a quarter gig more for everyone who signs up through your referral link. It's PC, Mac and Linux compatible. I've used it on the former two, and it works fine, I assume it does on Linux, but can't comment from experience
Take something out of the folder on either computer, and it'll not be there on both. But they do keep backups of changes you've made – to get really good backup support you need to pay, but for occasional 'I didn't mean to take that out/delete that'. However, it doesn't ask you whether you want to upload, whether you want to take something out of the folder – whilst its possible to quit the program that does all the uploading and downloading, by default it runs from startup in the background.
There's a 'public' folder, anything you drop in there will be downloadable from the web, from an address something like this – http://dl.dropbox.com/u/0000000/ – where the zeros are replaced by a number associated with your account. You can right click the file to copy the URL, but I've just bookmarked the constant part of it, and add the directory and file name by hand. There's a bandwidth limit, but they say it's by file rather than overall.
There's also a 'photos' folder where it automatically creates a gallery for images you put in it, by folder, and has an okay slideshow function. Here's an example of that: A load of Motivational Posters from the LARP I do.
Finally, you can create shared folders, which take up space on everyone's dropbox, but which update when anyone changes anything in them.
Right, enough description, time for review!
I find dropbox really fucking useful. I think you'll find it useful if you regularly:
a) transfer files from one of your computers to another (across a home network or similar, whilst it still uploads to server at the normal rate it downloads from the other computer not the website, which is much faster),
b) want to put stuff online such as photos to display on LJ (assuming the number of people looking at such won't be on a super-high level),
c) want to go "Hey look at this" and throw a file at one or many friends.
d) want to get stuff onto or off a smartphone from the field/without messing with cables.
I've had it ignore a file, or claim to have uploaded it when it hadn't a couple of times, but that's been a very rare occasion in the midst of a lot of heavy use.
Beyond getting files from laptop to either of my desktops and visa versa, I've made a lot of use of it putting images on LJ, I now keep my RPG character sheets in a folder on it so that if my laptop stops working, I can game or print the sheets from a desktop. The sharing folders isn't something I've had a huge amount of experience with, but that which I have had has been good – shared resources that both side can add to are cool, and I can see it being incredibly useful in collaborative projects.
One of the best things about it is just the fact that it's a folder on your computer – when I want to show someone something via the web or otherwise, I hit save, click on the public folder, and then when it's finished saving, keep half an eye on the little menu icon that tells me when the upload is done. That and the space – two gigabytes is enough to move things on reasonable scale between two computers. It'll take a while to do, but cuts down the number of chunks you're doing in enough that it's worth using for that. Also, two gigabytes and fairly high downloads bandwidth usage limits is why I now don't really use my domain name to host files that I want to pass quickly to friends or images for LJ – the domain is still useful for looking professional and having a short and more memorable URL, but dropbox is far better for anything where those two don't apply.
It's also useful with my iPhone, and![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
redhillian has said the same about his android smartphone – there's an app which lets you look at what files are on your dropbox, read them if they're the right file types, and upload photos and videos to to it. I've also got a third party app which lets me mass upload every single photo on the phone (which hasn't already been so uploaded) as one action – something that'd be slow and labour-intensive with the official app. There's a fair few other apps to write and upload plaintext and do other stuff.
So, if you want a dropbox after all that, and you're willing to help me out in getting more space for mine, then click this link: http://db.tt/KKiFgvD
You'll also get an extra quarter gig yourself, for signing up from a referral rather than from just going to the website on your own. If you still want to get one but not via a referral, I'm sure you're smart enough to find the website and sign up there. Feel free to ask any questions if you want to know more about how it works or whatever.
Dropbox is one of those Cloud computing things that get mentioned every so often. The way it works is that on a computer, you download a program and link that to an online account. This program creates a 'dropbox' folder. Anything put into that folder will be uploaded to the Dropbox servers. Then, if you put a dropbox folder on a different computer, it'll download every last thing that's currently in the dropbox folder. You can also upload and download to it from any computer by signing in on the website. Two computers on at the same can pass things back and forth fairly quickly (depending on their upload and download speeds). You start off with 2GB for free, you can get a quarter gig more for everyone who signs up through your referral link. It's PC, Mac and Linux compatible. I've used it on the former two, and it works fine, I assume it does on Linux, but can't comment from experience
Take something out of the folder on either computer, and it'll not be there on both. But they do keep backups of changes you've made – to get really good backup support you need to pay, but for occasional 'I didn't mean to take that out/delete that'. However, it doesn't ask you whether you want to upload, whether you want to take something out of the folder – whilst its possible to quit the program that does all the uploading and downloading, by default it runs from startup in the background.
There's a 'public' folder, anything you drop in there will be downloadable from the web, from an address something like this – http://dl.dropbox.com/u/0000000/ – where the zeros are replaced by a number associated with your account. You can right click the file to copy the URL, but I've just bookmarked the constant part of it, and add the directory and file name by hand. There's a bandwidth limit, but they say it's by file rather than overall.
There's also a 'photos' folder where it automatically creates a gallery for images you put in it, by folder, and has an okay slideshow function. Here's an example of that: A load of Motivational Posters from the LARP I do.
Finally, you can create shared folders, which take up space on everyone's dropbox, but which update when anyone changes anything in them.
Right, enough description, time for review!
I find dropbox really fucking useful. I think you'll find it useful if you regularly:
a) transfer files from one of your computers to another (across a home network or similar, whilst it still uploads to server at the normal rate it downloads from the other computer not the website, which is much faster),
b) want to put stuff online such as photos to display on LJ (assuming the number of people looking at such won't be on a super-high level),
c) want to go "Hey look at this" and throw a file at one or many friends.
d) want to get stuff onto or off a smartphone from the field/without messing with cables.
I've had it ignore a file, or claim to have uploaded it when it hadn't a couple of times, but that's been a very rare occasion in the midst of a lot of heavy use.
Beyond getting files from laptop to either of my desktops and visa versa, I've made a lot of use of it putting images on LJ, I now keep my RPG character sheets in a folder on it so that if my laptop stops working, I can game or print the sheets from a desktop. The sharing folders isn't something I've had a huge amount of experience with, but that which I have had has been good – shared resources that both side can add to are cool, and I can see it being incredibly useful in collaborative projects.
One of the best things about it is just the fact that it's a folder on your computer – when I want to show someone something via the web or otherwise, I hit save, click on the public folder, and then when it's finished saving, keep half an eye on the little menu icon that tells me when the upload is done. That and the space – two gigabytes is enough to move things on reasonable scale between two computers. It'll take a while to do, but cuts down the number of chunks you're doing in enough that it's worth using for that. Also, two gigabytes and fairly high downloads bandwidth usage limits is why I now don't really use my domain name to host files that I want to pass quickly to friends or images for LJ – the domain is still useful for looking professional and having a short and more memorable URL, but dropbox is far better for anything where those two don't apply.
It's also useful with my iPhone, and
redhillian has said the same about his android smartphone – there's an app which lets you look at what files are on your dropbox, read them if they're the right file types, and upload photos and videos to to it. I've also got a third party app which lets me mass upload every single photo on the phone (which hasn't already been so uploaded) as one action – something that'd be slow and labour-intensive with the official app. There's a fair few other apps to write and upload plaintext and do other stuff.So, if you want a dropbox after all that, and you're willing to help me out in getting more space for mine, then click this link: http://db.tt/KKiFgvD
You'll also get an extra quarter gig yourself, for signing up from a referral rather than from just going to the website on your own. If you still want to get one but not via a referral, I'm sure you're smart enough to find the website and sign up there. Feel free to ask any questions if you want to know more about how it works or whatever.
