After listening to many podcasts in the TWIT universe I finally decided to give Dropbox a try last night.  The only reason that I was finally moved to do it was I didn’t have a jump drive near me and I wanted to work on a school paper on my MacBook. The paper was on my desktop PC. Yes, I could have emailed it but that seemed so 1998.  Instead I decided to download the dropbox client on my Vista machine and then my Mac. After about 5 minutes with Dropbox I realized that anyone that is super mobile should be using it.

So easy

I have tried in the past of creating a web folder with my unlimited account at HostGator and then sharing it between multiple machines. This was always janky and never seemed to work right (definitely not HostGator’s fault, those guys are awesome!), so I resorted back to using jump drives and email to get files back and forth.

Dropbox creates a folder anywhere you want on your drive. Anything that goes into this folder will be automatically synced to your Dropbox web account and therefore synced with any other machine that has your Dropbox file on it. It is seriously that easy. There isn’t anything else to say about it.

Can you say ‘convenient’?

I primarily work off of three machines on a daily basis; my home PC, my MacBook that is glued to my back, and my work PC. Knowing where my files are is sometimes tricky.  I work on several website projects and sometimes files are in the wrong place, meaning that I forget where they are. I put my entire project folder in my free 2GB dropbox and that was that. Anywhere I go now I know that I will have the files that I need to work with.

Sharing capabilities

This is something that I am excited about but have yet to try out; mainly because I installed Dropbox last night. I can imagine that this would change the way that I work at school with other students, the same way that Google docs has. This could be especially useful when I want to share a Visual Basic program with someone; rather than send them the code in text I could share the entire solution folder. Pretty awesome.

And that’s about it. Dropbox is one of those programs that “just works” or has worked for me thus far. If you have a bunch of PCs, Macs, and even Linux boxes (that’s right, Linux) that you work on daily or are a student that works on multiple systems, then Dropbox is for you. Go get your 2GB of free storage here.

Hey, maybe this is a good piece of software to add to this list.

Recommended books about this topic:

• Dot Cloud: The 21st Century Business Platform Built on Cloud Computing
• Cloud Security and Privacy: An Enterprise Perspective on Risks and Compliance (Theory in Practice)
• Cloud Computing, A Practical Approach