Despite the fact that most of my real and online acquaintances are involved in IT to one degree or another, I very often notice a certain unawareness among my friends when it comes to geeky tools and such. For example, in a team of seven young IT folks (4 developers + 2 sysadmins + support), none of them over 35, not a single person uses Jabber! Everyone is stuck on the cursed ICQ. Well, that can still be chalked up to personal taste, to the fact that moms, wives, and girlfriends are on ICQ — fine. But when people don’t use Dropbox, I’m genuinely surprised. Or rather, regular folks can be forgiven for it, but for an IT person it’s practically a sin not to use tools that make life significantly easier and cost nothing.
I have one acquaintance who is a principled opponent of any convenience utilities. Back in the day, he even edited HTML in Notepad, arguing that you might end up at someone else’s machine where your usual programs won’t be installed. And then he’d have the advantage, while I, accustomed to all sorts of gadgets, would suffer and be unable to work. Hard to say how right he was, but I still love customizing my workspace to my liking. And despite the occasional inconvenience of not immediately switching the keyboard layout on someone else’s machine, I’ll still remap Caps Lock on computers I use regularly. I’ll move the taskbar to the right in both KDE and Windows. Back in my student days with Windows 2000, I read something — try moving the taskbar there (to the right), and you’ll never want to move it back. And I’ll keep installing plugins in my heavy, bloated Firefox to sync bookmarks, block ads and JavaScript.
So, one of those tools that helps keep the same environment across different machines is the Dropbox service. You install a little app on your Linux machine after registering on the site, and an icon sits in the system tray. Any files you put in a specific folder are immediately uploaded by that app to its server. You come to work, install the same app on your Windows work machine, and your home files are waiting for you at the office. For example, I keep there: - settings for a couple of programs (AIMP skins, Total Commander configs, tcsh and Conky configs, a podcast aggregator subscription file, printer profiles) - the current version of my resume - scanned passport photos — always needed somewhere, especially back when I was a student - an encrypted password database (the encryption program deserves a separate post) - all my master’s degree materials — lectures, methods, etc. (should probably delete them by now, but during thesis writing it was very convenient to gather material from multiple places into one) - a small library of popular science and how-to literature - the cache of the Scrapbook plugin (those who don’t use it have never felt the disappointment of having a desperately needed bookmark lead to a page that no longer exists)
In summary, Dropbox is like a flash drive over the internet. This flash drive won’t get lost, won’t be stolen, and you’ll never forget it at home. Did I mention you can log in through a browser and download any file or folder? And that you can restore deleted files? There’s also a 30-day file history in the free plan, and unlimited history in the paid one. By the way, about pricing. For $99 a year you get 50 GB, for $199 — 100 GB. You get 2 GB for free, and you can invite friends — each referral adds 250 MB to both the inviter and the invitee. So if you somehow still don’t have this wonderful service, welcome to register! PS: Did I mention that Dropbox has versions for Android, iPhone/iPad, and BlackBerry? :)