One of the big fears with using technology in the classroom (or in general) is the fear that you might not have the files you need with you when you need them. The more computers you have, the bigger the anxiety that the file will be on the wrong one. You might have started drafting something at work but now you’re home sitting on your hands while your document—unfinished—sits on your desktop at work.
Sure, you could keep everything on a flash drive, but then you run the risk of losing the flash drive—arguably much worse than your file sitting on the wrong computer. What if you could have all of your files on all of your computers? Well—wait for it—you can with Dropbox. With Dropbox, you could start drafting something on your desktop, then on a whim grab your laptop and head to the coffee shop with minimal hassle and increased reliability.
Dropbox is a free service that makes it dead simple to sync all of your files among as many computers as your heart desires. It’s powered by Amazon’s S3 servers, so it’s about as reliable as it gets (many of the services you rely on daily reside on Amazon’s servers). If you find yourself on a foreign computer, Dropbox’s web interface makes it easy to get at the files you placed in your drop box.
Yes, you could theoretically do this with FTP or even Apple’s iDisk—but neither of those have ever been particularly easy. To sweeten the deal, Dropbox also stores a back-up of each version of the file left in their care. If you deleted a paragraph from your doctoral thesis that you regret, right-click on the file and select “Revisions…” to travel back in time to an older version of that file. In addtion, you can resurrect deleted files.
Dropbox integrates as a regular folder on your hard drive and syncs silently in the background. Dropbox runs happily on Mac, Windows, and Linux. Dropbox freely offers 2.0 GB for starters, which might as well be infinite if you’re just dropping off documents. If you’re syncing large media collections or you want to store your iTunes library online, it’s going to cost you $9.99 a month (or $99 a year, if you can commit) to sync up to 50 GB. But, as I said, it’s unlikely you’re going to need more than 2.0 GB. As of this writing, I’m using 0.3% of my allotted space.
Dropbox offers a great alternative for those that need to access their files across multiple machines but need to use tools a little more robust than Google Documents.
Some savvy folks have used Dropbox to keep their address books and bookmarks synced between multiple computers. I can only confirm that this works on Mac and Linux. Also, you need to be comfortable with the terminal. If you’re interested, you can find out more here.
