Dropbox - Offline file sharing made easy

For those who are not familiar with Dropbox then you are missing out on what is the simplest and feature rich file sharing application I have used.

I came across this when I was having trouble with the Windows XP offline files feature. Essentially I had a few users using a mapped drive to a server and then sharing files within. The troublesome bit comes when you want to take these files offline and work on them away from the office. The offline files feature of Windows XP was becoming a constant pain where certain users synchronisation had stopped working or folder structures did not update correctly.

I needed an application which allowed users to share documents and also use them offline with ease and not have any issues with file conflicts if multiple users opened the same file at the same time.

So along came Dropbox. An easy product to setup and is free to a certain extent. The free version has a limit of 2Gb storage. In this day and age this isn't a lot but for office documents it is fine. The paid version has a limit of 50Gb and costs $99 per year (at the time of writing).

Dropbox uses Amazon S3 for its back-end storage and should be very reliable.

In the scenario above I created one account with Dropbox and then added the software to all the users laptops using the same account information. The install creates a local folder on drive C: and any file(s) put in the local Dropbox are automatically uploaded to Dropbox and then downloaded to your other users who are using the same Dropbox account. It all works in the background and the user doesn't have to do anything. A Windows pop-up will notify a user when a file has been added or changed which is handy.

If users do open a file at the same time, the Dropbox system will realise and create two new files when saved with the users name amending the file name.

Users who do not have access to their laptop or network can login to the Dropbox website and access the shared files through a web browser, and there's also an iPhone app in the pipeline.

Some other nice features are the Dropbox system are keeping a history of file changes in the Dropbox folder so you can restore to an earlier version if a file is corrupted or deleted. Files can be made public if need be by the Dropbox system creating a URL to the path of the file you want to share. Users on the same LAN can sync files quickly between each other without having to wait for the file to upload to the Dropbox servers first. There is also a Mac and Linux version available which can all be linked to the same account.

Overall a very simple and impressive application. Even if not used in business it is handy for keeping backups of your important files and MP3's. You can check out the service at www.getdropbox.com