Dropbox: online folder to easily sync your data across different computers

Like many users, I regularly use more than one computer: one at home (a Mac) and one at work (Linux workstation). This kind of situation creates some challenges regarding how to keep your data synchronized between the different computers/operating systems.

That's where the free online service Dropbox comes handy. It creates a local folder called Dropbox in your "home". Everything that you dump in that folder is automatically synced with the online folder, and immediately made available to all your computers. You just need to install a dropbox client in each computer, and that's it. Thanks to Dropbox, I almost don't need to use USB flash drives anymore to sync data between different computers. Sweet!

Dropbox has a cool feature: it lets you share a folder among a group of people. Let me give an example of how that can be useful. Suppose you have coworkers/collaborators and you are working together on some code, paper or data. Suppose that you are constantly updating your code/paper/data and your collaborator wants to always have the latest version of it. When you share a dropbox folder with your collaborators, every change that you or your coworker make to any file in that folder is automatically made available to all the people sharing the folder. See how the sharing feature can be useful?

Dropbox gives you a free 2 GB account. For paid accounts, they provide more space (up to 100 GB).

Link to join Dropbox (includes a tour of the features).

Changelog:

• May 31 2010: Added "sharing" feature.