Centre for Right Direction (CRD)

Source : Chip Magazine. March, 2009. Written by Manuell Schreiber and Jamshed Avari 

Access your files anywhere on any system and share them with others too.

( https://www.getdropbox.com/referrals/NTY5MzIwMTk )

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Data is sensitive and vulnerable.  Backups are necessary, but do you ever have true peace of mind?  A disaster could wipe out your data without any hopes of recovery.  Your hard disk could crash, DVD’s could get destroyed in a fire, and USB sticks can easily be lost or stolen. The Internet offers a number of free online backup sites for this reason, and one such service called Dropbos really stands out.

Dropbox is a flexible and user-friendly online storage service that integrates perfectly with your computer, be it running Windows, Mac OS X or Linux. You can synchronize the date on your PC, share photos with friends, or work on documents with colleagues while tracking revisions. You get 2 GB of free memory accessible from anywhere in the world, though most people will find this insufficient and should check out the paid plans for extra storage space. Another caveat is that you must log on to Dropbox at least once every 90 days in order to keep your files from being wiped out.

Installing and using Dropbox

Dropbox ( https://www.getdropbox.com/referrals/NTY5MzIwMTk ) needs you to download and install a client on each PC you want to use it with. The Windows client is about 14 MB to download, and you will also find clients for Mac OS X and Linux on the site. Thus, your data can be synchronized irrespective of the OS you prefer.

The installation is straightforward once you run the setup file. All you have to do is enter an email address and a password to create your account for online access. Dropbox then creates a “My Dropbox” entry in your Windows Explorer and My Computer structure At the outset, this folder contains two default sub-folders, named ‘Photos’ and ‘Public’.  For direct access to these folders and some other useful functions, a small application will run in the Windows System Tray. You can use it to adjust upload and download speed throttles by right–clicking on the icon, or configuring it if your Internet connection requires authentication through a proxy.

Once it’s set up, you can test the connection to the Dropbox server by simply copying any image or document from a folder on your hard drive to the Dropbox folder in Windows Explore.  A small icon overlaid over the files shows you its status at a glance. The icon will be a blue circle to indicate that the file is being uploaded, and a green checkmark indicates that the file is online.  Dropbox uses a secure SSL connection to transfer the files, and saves the sent packets with a 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) key. The upload will take a few seconds or minutes depending on the size of the file, your internet connection, and the server load. Now log on to https://www.getdropbox.com/referrals/NTY5MzIwMTk  and sign in using the same credentials you specified. You will see a Dropbox folder structure identical to that on your PC. If you add more folders on your hard drive, the online account incorporates this change. In order to check if your file has been added, simply navigate to the respective folder or check the “Recent events” listing on the “Home” tab. All the latest uploads downloads and shares are displayed here.

You can install the Dropbox client on multiple PCs and link them to the same account. The files visible in each computer’s Dropbox folder will always be the same, and will constantly be synchronized between them. Check your online access under “Account | manage Computers” on the website to ensure that Dropbox recognizes all the PCs you’ve sent your account up on. After doing that, you just have to move files into one of your computers ‘My Dropbox’ folders and you are ready to access and edit them on any of the computers. You can use this functionality to share files with coworkers, since Dropbox  can track any file’s revision history and let you restore previous versions of edited files. Any file deleted from the Dropbox folder disappears, but can be restored through the Web interface.

The Windows client is useful and spares you a lot of time spent on uploading files. However, Make sure you don’t install it on any computer you use, because it saves your password by default and doesn’t verify the identity of anyone using the same PC. You can always upload files through a browser by logging in to the website and selecting ‘Upload | Add more files’.

Additional features

Dropbox would have been just another online hard drive service were it not for a couple of brilliant features.

Anything that goes into the Public folder can be accessed through a unique URL, which you can email to anyone in order to let them download a copy of the file. In order to share your files with other users, first create a folder in th browser under “Share | Create  A new shared folder”. Then click on the folder that is to be shared and enter the email address of the recipient on the right side of the screen under “Share This Folder”. Recipients can only share your files or edit and reupload them if they also have Dropbox account.  The free Dropbox account is limited to ten invitations.

If you only want to share a couple of photos, the default photos folder automatically creates galleries out of the images you put in it, which you can then share with you friends. Recipients do not need a Dropbox account in this case. Create a new subfolder under “Photos” and move your photos to it.  Now you can publish your photos by putting the link ID of this folder on your blog or by sending it through email. The link ID is a special URL that you find by right-clicking the folder and selecting ‘Copy and paste this link to share’.