Dropbox and Mac OS X: Access your files from everywhere
Today, Neakro showed me a tool called “Dropbox”. It’s like a virtual hard drive, you can use to store files on a server, online. Some folders are private, some folders are public. So you can access your data from everywhere. This idea isn’t new, is it? But Dropbox has some very nice features.
The basic account – which is completely free – provides 2 GB storage, which is, in my mind, a lot of space to share and store files at. There’s an OS X client, which will be integrated into the functions of Finder. The Linux client needs Nautilus, which will surely piss off some KDE users 
.
After installing the OS X client, you’ll have a new menu icon on the top right of your screen. You can access all the basic functions and preferences there, as well as opening the web frontend in your browser. But the real magic happens in Finder itself.
There will be a new folder within your home directory called “Dropbox” (you can rename this one). It’s an ordinary folder, except, that it’ll be mirrored on the servers of Dropbox. So if you install Dropbox on other machines, you’ll always have the same files. It’s also possible to share specific folders in order to work with other people collaboratively.
You can easily work with the Dropbox folder, as with any other folder:
And a pretty nice feature is, to generate URL’s to the files you want to share. In the picture above, I have placed a file called “test.rtf” in my public folder. Rightclicking this file will give me the following option:
I can easily generate an URL and publish the link to friends, co-workers etc in order to download this file. In my case it is: http://files.getdropbox.com/u/1537208/test.rtf. I’ll try to keep this file online.
Another very nice feature is the web frontend. You can access all your files from any computer, where Dropbox isn’t installed. You can create new public folders, share folders, download everything, browse through fotos and so on. IMHO the best feature is the history option. You can see everything that happened (creating folders, deleting files, editing files, etc), compare the differences and even undo changes or restore deleted files and folders:
When I heard about Dropbox my first thought was like “Why not using SMB / NFS with Apache, etc”. But after testing it, I saw some really unique and perfectly integrated features. It’s not only for sharing some files on multiple computers. It has its own TimeMachine, it’s perfect for collaborative work, I can generate URLs to local files with one click and so on. Besides all that, it doesn’t just upload your local files. It uploads only changes, which saves a lot of traffic, when you edit large files.
I’ll keep using it the next few weeks and hope, I won’t find some disadvantages.
Neakro said, he’s going to try to simulate a similar service using rsync, apache and git. I’m really curious about whether he’ll be successful.
Everyone who’s interested in this service – you can give it a try at:
http://www.getdropbox.com
If you want to do me a favour, use this URL to register. It’ll give me and you some extra MB space
https://www.getdropbox.com/referrals/NTE1MzcyMDg5