Today a couple of odd posts showed up on my Facebook and Twitter pages about my favorite online service, Dropbox. (Note: the previous link is a referral link to Dropbox. More on this in a bit.) This is because Dropbox recently put up a page where folks could get up to an extra 768M of space by doing some simple social media connection stuff.
I've talked about Dropbox before, but it still never ceases to amaze me how many times I find new uses for it. Let's look at a few of the ones I've been using:
- There's a folder called "Torrents" in my Dropbox. I've also installed Dropbox on the server I have at my house running uTorrent. uTorrent monitors this folder and when new torrents show up there, it starts downloading them. So, I just download a torrent into that folder from any machine I'm logged in to and I'm good to go!
- If I need to get a file into my new EC2-hosted Ubuntu box, no worries. I've got the text-based install on it and I just drop them into there. Also, if I need to do major edits on config files, I can get them to my desktop quickly.
- Thanks to some of Dropbox' partners, I essentially have an extra 4G on my iPhone now. More and more mobile apps are using Dropbox for back end storage because it's easily accessed and ubiquitous. I've held off until now, but I'm finally upgrading to iOS 4 simply to give Picbox a try. But for now...
- When I have a quiet moment at the office, I plug my iPhone into my laptop and dump all current photos from the phone into my Dropbox folder so they're ready to be organized when I get home.
- Still in the works: I've got Portable Firefox out there. I've put in a master password, so my passwords are encrypted and thus protected from prying eyes @ Dropbox. I'm in the process of setting up the instance of Firefox on my laptop to use the profile directory that's in the Dropbox folder so I have one universal Firefox profile across machines.
- When I first started my new job, I had some coding work that they needed me to do for my old team. Unfortunately, I didn't get Visual Studio with my new machine and didn't have rights to install it. So, I used an online service to take control of my home machine's desktop and did my changes there. Once the code was compiled, I plopped the executable into my Dropbox and was able to get it back to my team.
- My wife doesn't have a lot of data she keeps on her machine. In fact, almost all of it fits within her 2G of space, so I have her keep all of her files in the Dropbox folder on her machine. Tada! All of her files are backed up as soon as they're created!
- Dropbox also keeps old versions of files. There's been a couple of times where I saved a file and overwrote an original I didn't want to change. No biggie, find the file on the website and click "Previous versions" to get the older instance back. Lifesaver!
I'm sure you can find plenty of other uses yourself or at least find dozens of solutions other folks have come up with. I've looked at some of the other services that are out there, but I just keep coming back to Dropbox for its ease of use and ubiquity. Here's a quick start guide to get you up and running with tons of space as quickly as possible:
1. Hit Dropbox' site. That link is a referral which will give both you and I an extra 250M of space in our accounts once you've installed the software.
2. Download and install a client on your machine. At this point, we each get our extra space. Total space: 2.25G
3. Revisit your Dropbox home page. At the top of the page, you'll see a set of tabs (Getting Started, Files, Events, Sharing, Help). That Getting Started tab is where we're headed next. Go through the steps listed and you'll get an extra 250M of space! You don't have to do all of them, I'd start with 1, 2, 3, & 5. I think those were all I needed to do to get the extra 250M. Total space: 2.5G.
4. Head to the new Free page and do each of the steps listed. Once you're done, you'll get up to an extra 768M of space for free. If you're not happy about exposing everything to Dropbox on Facebook or Twitter, simply deactivate the application's access once you're done. The free space will stay. Total space: 3.328G.
5. Get referrals. At that link, you'll find your referral link that you can give out to friends and family for more space. You can get up to an extra 10G of space this way. Please be aware of some etiquette. There are a number of sites like Lifehacker that will ban you if you post your referral link in their comments. A lot of people take advantage of their Dropbox-based posts to try and drum up some space, and the comments become useless because of it.
Also, the URLs posted to your Facebook and Twitter pages after you do step 4? All of them are referral links to your account. So, once you've done that step, you've also put out a couple of requests for referrals. How cool is that?
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