I have long envied people that live the cloud life as Paul describes it, and while many people over the years have said that I have my head in the clouds, or that I live up on Cloud 9, it really isn’t something that my life style requires or benefits from.
I looked at Memopal a couple of months ago and liked it, especially the 250GB of storage, but couldn’t find a place for it in my workflow. Basically having effectively your whole hard drive on line sort of seemed pointless at the end of the day ….. may as well take the MacBook Pro with me i.e. if I need access to all my data all the time then surely I would be better with it offline and accessible?
From time to time I do have a need to access a document from another computer, and to share them with people that I am working on a project with, or as Dropbox call it “seamlessly sync files between multiple computers as well as act as a conduit for backing up files online”.
For me the single biggest plus is the seamless integration on the Mac. Can’t say what it is like on Windows (and frankly don’t care), nor on Linux (but that is because I have never bothered to look at Linux yet), but in the Mac it sits in the Finder:
That said it is an online service, so using it online sort of makes sense, and for setting up shared folders that is certainly the way to go:
Once set up it is just a case of dragging files across to the folder and hey presto, online sharing, either with yourself across computers, or with colleagues.
So the way things are looking Dropbox seems to have worked its way well into my workflow and I think will stay as part of it. In time I am sure the free 2GB will become a limitation (and solvable via a paid for larger option) and I have no doubt that the more ‘heavyweight’ users would want to have greater control over encryption and secure storage (at the moment everything resides on their S3 account so even if you have your own – which for some reason I actually do! – you still have to use theirs), and for those with more data than disc space the ‘all of nothing’ approach doesn’t allow you to select specific files on a ‘on demand’ basis. I sense that these are limitations that will be addressed in future (paid for) versions …….
Yes I do have a few invites if you want to leave a comment or drop me an email.
This is a very informative post. I just wanted to let you know that we have a product offering a similar solution.
We offer small business users (or nomadic professionals, as we like to call ourselves) an innovative way to share documents and work together on a “virtual filesever.”.
Check out NomaDesk and give it a try.
If you have any questions just contact us, we’d be happy to help!
Crazy
Hey chris,
Thanks for this informative post about dropbox. Sounds like being worth to have a look at it… mind sharing me some invite?
I especially like the unobstrusive way dropbox seems to be working (as in only drop your files and they get synced eventually), as most other solution don’t seem to do it that way.
Regards
Martin
Sure, invite sent and ditto Glenn Haist as per email