I’ve been using Dropbox for a few weeks now. I recently upgraded to the paid service. It’s a little steep, $9.95 a month for 50GB, the free solution is about 4 GB I believe. When you consider the amount of storage you get from most hosting solutions, it’s not a good value. But the value in Dropbox is in the application. It resides as a diretory on your machine; I have put mine directly in my Documents directory. It’s made even more easily accesible in Windows via a sys tray icon, and on the Mac from the right-hand side Finder menu. You can work out of the directory and never have to worry about having different versions of documents on different machines, or worry about losing any data if a hard drive blows out. Additionally, you can access all of your documents from the Dropbox website, meaning the machine you’re on doesn’t need the app installed.
You can also share documents with other registered Dropbox users, though I don’t have much experience with this use. I have been told that you can have issues if two users try to modify the same document at the same time. For me the benefit is more the ability to have access to documents from multiple computers. This saves me time moving files between work and home, home pc and home notebook, etc. No more forgetting files at one location either. I am now storing almost all of my documents on Dropbox, and working directly from them.
I’m hoping they increase the storage so media storage becomes feasible, and makes the $9.95 cost even more of a value, but otherwise, I am really impressed and I highly reccomend checking out the free version.
