Using DropBox to Keep Your Docs All Sync’d Up
I like the idea of keeping all of my documents up in the internet could and getting at them from wherever I am. Dropbox is the only solution I’ve seen that makes that possible. Google docs is almost there, but doesn’t include all of the features I want to see yet. Essentially what dropbox does is it keeps your documents in sync across multiple computers. Whenever I save a word document at home, it is instantly uploaded (without clicking a thing) to the dropbox servers, and then pushed to my computer at work. All of my documents at home, therefore, are the same as my documents at school (with about a 2 second lag time).
Ever have to drive home quickly because you forgot to email yourself something? Not me, all the documents on all of my computers are the same. Ever forget to print something out but not have it on the computer in the classroom? Even if you only have one computer, all of your documents are stored on the dropbox website and you can download them on any computer.
This would be good for any business, but there are a few features that make it totally great. First of all, all the files are transferred over SSL (nerd speak for a secure connection) which means that if you want to get a movie file or an .exe through your school’s restricting BS network (deep breaths Kadin…deep breaths), you are all good. Even nicer, inside your dropbox folder, there is a separate sub-folder called “Public.” You can get a url (a link) to any file you place in this directory.
You can use this link when you send documents to students. Rather than sending attachments in emails, the students can simply click the link. This is really helpful for class blogs that don’t have a space for uploading files. The link that you get points towards the actual file on your computer as well, not a temporary copy of the file. Thus, if you post a power point on your class blog (like I do, blog.mrkadin.com) and then later make a change to one of the slides on your computer, the students will get the most up to date version of the presentation when they click the link later on. Booyah.
Seriously, this is an amazingly powerful tool and it works for PC/Mac and….Linux! The cost: Free.99
1 comment
Drop box is a great tool like Mike said. Being an IT Specialist, I thought I would comment on some down sides to using it. Drop box is great and if companies/school are thinking of downloading the software to make the sync process better, there is a problem with using your my documents folder as the source file to sync when using folder redirection. Folder redirection is when your my documents don’t live on the computer that you are working on. It is a network share that takes place of your local my documents folder and it is seamless to the end user. We tested the drop box software to try to get it to work with folder redirection but it is not supported. Another drawback is that if you are storing large files that you are constantly uploading and downloading from drop box like movie files, it’s going to be very slow. The LAN network speed is 100x+ faster than any internet connection. If you do sync large files, it decrease the internet speed for whoever is using that connection and companies/school try to maximize that connection for a lot of people. So if they see a certain website, application consuming a large chunk of the bandwidth, they might limit the amount of bandwidth that website or app can use or deny it all together depending on the environment. I would strongly recommend people use this service wisely and not abuse it for example getting around firewalls or internet shaping tools. Another drawback is that if you delete something that you didn’t mean to delete, you may not be able to retrieve it. I haven’t used drop box other than testing purposes, but companies do have backup programs that can restore and single change or three plus changes ago. We have this at the school where I work. It’s called continuous backup and it backs up every change that is done to a file and we can restore any changed version. With cloud computing, you may not have the luxury. You should keep that in mind as well. Cloud computing is great but nothing is perfect. Do your research before jumping into something. Ask your IT department if you have questions. That’s why we exist!
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