Introducing Dropbox

I wanted to write a quick article today about a new service that has really helped me get organised this month.

As you’ve probably already gathered from the title above, the service is Dropbox – and I get the feeling that it’s probably one of those things that the vast majority of people have heard of (and probably been using!) for ages. I only found it a couple of weeks ago, so if you’ve been using it for a while, you might want to skip this post.

If you’ve never heard of it though, stick with me.

Dropbox is essentially a tool which allows you to both back up and synchronise your data. It works across both Mac and PC and also offers users the option of downloading a mobile app to your Blackberry, Apple or Android phone.

So what does this mean in practical terms? Well, let’s say you’ve finished doing your month end reports. By placing your report in Dropbox, not only are you protecting the file against corrupition or accidental deletion, but you’re also ensuring that you can get access to that file on any other PC or Mac that you use.

What’s more, should you need those numbers while you’re on the move, you can open the file on your mobile without any problem.

But lets say those numbers need updating.

Again, not a problem. You can open the file on which ever device is closest to hand, make your changes and when you save and close your file, this latest version will automatically be updated on Dropbox. In essence, you can be sure that whenever/wherever you open a particular document, the information you’re seeing is always up to date.

Read this before you sign up:

The good news is that Dropbox is free – sure, if you’re going to start backing up music and video files then they’re going to charge you. Not a huge amount, but they will charge you.

However, as long as your storing under 2GB of stuff, the thing is totally free.

Now if you’re going to give this a test run, can I ask that you click through to the site using THIS LINK.

As all good deals should do, signing up through that link will give us both something – when you download the software, we’ll both get an extra 250MB of storage added to our account at no extra cost. In other words, you’ll be able to back up 2.25GB of data for free rather than the standard 2GB.

In the meantime, I’ll leave you with a quick video clip, which may well explain Dropbox a whole lot better than I’ve just done!