Why I Love Dropbox
A while back I signed up to Dropbox at http://www.getdropbox.com/ It was still in beta at the time and I thought to myself it was just another online file storage solution, kind of like box.net which I was already using. But then when I started to see how brilliant it was it ended up being a big part of my workflow, and something I now couldn't live without.
For a long time I carried around a Firewire drive everywhere I went. This contained all my main source files for my website, my experiments and various other personal projects. I've sometimes described it as my digital sketchbook. So when I get to work I plug it in and I have everything to hand, ditto when I'm on the train or at home. But, whilst it gets backed up every week, it's not ideal, plus it's just something else to carry. So I signed up to the 50GB plan on Dropbox and now all the files that were on this disk are now on Dropbox. Which means they get backed up automatically. So even if I'm heading to a conference with my presentation in my Dropbox folder and my Macbook dies, I can simply login into Dropbox and download the files onto another machine.
The other cool thing about it is one consistent place for source files. So on the three Macs I use, I have things like Processing pointing to a folder inside Dropbox. So if I work on a file at work, when I get home I simply fire up my Mac and carry on working on that same file. All done invisibly.
But there's another killer feature of Dropbox that many people don't realise. It keeps versions of your files. Yeah. Honest. So if you screw something up or want to go back to a previous version you simply control-click on the file and you can visit the version history.
I also now use Dropbox for posting out files to places like Twitter using the public folder, and for making really quick photo galleries using the Photo folder.
Dropbox has been a complete revelation to me and if you haven't signed up yet please do - I know you'll love it.
