Back in November, fed up with the slow speed and buggy implementation of Apple’s iDisk service via MobileMe, I decided to try Dropbox – a cross-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux) computer-to-computer sync service. In short: it’s amazingly good.
Once installed, Dropbox listens at the OS level for changes to files within your designated Dropbox folder. The instant a file changes (like when you hit “Save” in your word processor) it gets synced to the cloud (Dropbox uses Amazon S3), and then gets “pushed” down from the cloud to any other computer you have Dropbox installed on. Think push-email for your files.
The first time you set it up, it can take several hours to sync all your files up to the cloud … but once that’s done once, subsequent syncs are very very fast.
The other great thing is that Dropbox maintains a history of your files, so that if you want to go back in time to a previous version of a file (e.g. a manuscript) you can. It’s like a cloud version of Apple’s Time Machine.
Unlike Apple’s iDisk service through MobileMe (which is a similar idea), Dropbox is FAST, and stable, and “just works”. I literally never have to think about file sync or backup.
The other nice thing is that it’s cross-platform, so if you have a mixture of Mac / Windows / Linux machines, you can have your Dropbox folder synced on all three, all the time, plus automatic time-history of changes.
Anyway you can tell I really like it and I highly recommend it.
