Get your own Drop Box
More and more people are starting to talk about one little startup: DropBox. Just as an example, in June the German Netzwertig gave it rave reviews and made many people ask for an invite. One of the shortest praises came from Simon Waldman:
> Online storage that just works, they say…and you know what, they’re right. Beg to get on their beta list.
I have to admit, that it is one of the few applications that are still running on my Macbook all the time. Simon does have some very good additional tips in that post, like Evernote and extra small Moleskins, but more on that later. Now on DropBox. I already wrote about it here and have now been playing with it for some time. So long actually that I was still in the beta group that got a 10GB storage box :)
The application is remarkably easy to use and running seemlessly in the background, simply telling you whether it is in sync with your ownline storage or not. It also has versioning and a restore feature. I just restored a folder with 68 images because I am going to friends today and might want to check out those pics there. I have to admit that I ma not yet sure how they pay for all of this because it means you have unlimited storage when you are clever. e.g. upload 1GB movie, delete, upload another, delete, restore the old one, … you will never go above 1GB but have endless movies in there. Of course they can limit the time of the backups but still. It is a wonderful feature though and makes the entire system a lot more interesting.
Above that they have some special folders, like Photos, which will give you a gallery for all folders below that. Upload fotos in there and very easily share via a hidden folder similar to how Picasa does it. Not sure if I am totally happy with that but hey, it’s survivable and it’s your choice if you want to share fotos like that. I really do presume though that a large part of the people out there will start using DropBox to keep their PCs in Sync, and with more people using it, DropBox should install the option to find out who else is on DropBox through an address book sync, allowing me to easily share stuff with people already on there.
The bad side is just that you will otherwise need to invite somebody, who will have to install the app, and that makes it cumbersome. But if you are already using it for yourself for some time, … then it gets interesting. This is where DropBox is moving. I am using it for a long time now, and if you want an invite, I have a few left.