Dropbox impressions: great for collaboration, multiple platform device synching
Last week, we mentioned Dropbox as another file synchronization service. Thanks to my good friend Dan at UNEASYsilence, I got a beta invite a few days ago and I’ve been kicking the tires ever since. I like what I’m kicking.
Since I have multiple devices on multiple platforms, I’m gravitating towards file synch tools that work on both Windows and Mac. Dropbox fills the bill with support for Microsoft Windows XP / Vista as well as Mac OS X Tiger / Leopard. Additionally, there’s a web interface that I used in Firefox on Xubuntu; this doesn’t provide any sync capabilities, but it does offer the ability to get your files.
Once installed, Dropbox adds a folder that’s aptly named "Dropbox". Any files you place in your Dropbox are automatically uploaded to a server and then sent back down to the dropbox of any other computers you have linked to your account. The advantage I see here is that not only are the files in sync between your devices, but there’s a central copy on the Dropbox servers as well.
Granted, I wouldn’t store any confidential docs on the server, but for everyday files, this is a great benefit and the Dropbox folks take advantage of it with a revision history feature. Every time you change the contents of a file in your Dropbox, the changes are sent through the system. As a result, Dropbox keeps the revision history of every file and you can restore back any prior version at any time through the web client.
From a collaboration standpoint, it’s basic and simple. You create a shared folder in your Dropbox account and invite others to access it. The shared folder becomes a sub-folder of the Dropbox folder on your local machine, so you simply drop a file in and it synchs up as expected. The file is then pushed down to the machines of your friends where they can view or edit it. If they make a change and save their local copy, the changes go back up to the server and get pushed out to all again, ensuring that your local copy is always up to date. Below is a shared folder for our MobileTechRoundup podcast; I invited Matt and James to the folder and then threw a simple text file for show notes. Hmm… they have the most recent copy, but didn’t add any thoughts! The obvious downside from a collaboration standpoint is that you’re working the files in a serial fashion, meaning you can’t actively work on a file at the same time as someone else.
One particular aspect I like on my Mac is using Growl, a notification tool, with Dropbox. Any time a shared file is updated, I get a notification in the top right of my monitor explaining which file was just updated. This isn’t a feature of Dropbox per se, but I wanted to mention it for any Mac users that also use Growl.
I like how Dropbox integrates in to your machine. On the Mac, you’ll see your Dropbox in the Finder under your user account name. You’ll also see a little graphical Dropbox on your menubar; a right click on it will provide options to open your local Dropbox or web client and there’s an indicator of how much of your Dropbox server storage is in use. On the Windows side, you’ll see a Dropbox folder in the My Documents area and there’s a tray icon that offers the same features as the Dropbox for the Mac menubar. In fact, just like Growl, the tray icon pops up notifications when a file is updated so you’ll know someone made a change.
Dropbox is currently in a private beta, but you can sign up and wait for an invite. It looks like the file limit is 25 MB per file and total space is 5 GB for now. No word on any potential price when it goes live. When I set up the MoTR shared folder, I found a little trick that got Matt and James access to the service. Simply inviting them to the shared folder got them a Dropbox account. So… no promises because I don’t know how long it will work, but I just set up a jkOTR shared folder. I’ll send invites to the first 10 commenters to this post; you’ll need to fill in the e-mail address of our comment field because I’ll need that to invite you. Hopefully, this will work, but if not… well, I tried. I’ll also put a simple text file in there so if you get in, feel free to write a quick note to us. If all goes as planned, it will synch down to our machines where we can read and update. 
UPDATE in my comment below on invites.
This sounds really useful! Thanks for the tip KCT!
Hi Kevin,
I’d certainly appreciate being able to test Dropbox, if it’s still possible. Thanks.
Hi Kevin,
Would love a chance to try it!
Me too, please. I signed up for the public beta after I read your first post, but sounds like it could be a wait.
Thanks!
I would also like to try, please.
I would love to try this service … so thanks in advance for the invite if there is some left
If I can…
Sounds like a great service.
I’d like to try this. I have been contemplating just such a service for my team collaboration.
Steve
cool, can i get a shot at it
Well, looks like I’m No. 11, but I’d love to give it a shot also. Thanks for the heads up nonetheless! I’ll definitely keep my eyes out for this one when it goes live.
i went out of the site for a while, and now i’m back, i see 10 people already sent in their comments.
mental note to myself: never let jkOnTheRun out of my sight!
Well, I gave it a shot and had good intentions. I added several of the e-mail addresses, but Dropbox only took two when I submitted them all. Apparently, my little trick was flagged.
I will reach out to the Dropbox folks directly and see if I can get more invites. At least enough to provide to 8 more… stay tuned!
Awesome!
Damn it! Stupid job always gets in the way!
I’m well after #10, but thanks for brining this tool to our attention and for offering up your invites.
Well, I’m poking around inside Dropbox. Its functionality is not intuitively obvious. After uploading/downloading a file, how do you delete it? Can you move files from one folder to another? These basic questions don’t appear to be covered in the FAQ. Searching the Forum didn’t help much either. Once you’re in the Forum there doesn’t appear to be a way out other than clicking the browser’s “Back” button. Dropbox might have a lot of great functionality; I’m just not sure how to get at it. I’ve used corporate VPN applications before but this is my first time “in the cloud” using a consumer service. My first impression is lukewarm at best. I might try one or two more attempts to figure it out before aborting.
My second impression of Dropbox is a little better after realizing an important insight: You can’t poke the cloud. While it appears files cannot be manipulated on the Dropbox web page, once I went back to my desktop it was pretty easy. Local actions (edit/paste/delete) are mirrored and tracked in the cloud. (Is there a patron saint of corrupt files?)
I’ll continue experimenting with Dropbox from my desktop computer but I removed it from my laptop. Although the files seem relatively small, Dropbox consumed about 1.5 GB of my harddisk — potentially significant for some portable devices. Second, the Dropbox uninstall program was not very effective; I still had to use the Windows uninstall and logon as administrator to delete the Dropbox folders. My general impression is that the developers mean well, but the application is not yet up to (my) commercial standards.
nomo, it is a beta, so probably not yet where the developers want it. That said: the only reason I can think of that the local Dropbox would be 1.5 GB on your hard drive is if you were storing that much data in it PLUS the shared / Public folder. My dropbox only takes up 2.8 MB on my local drive because I don’t have much in it.
I know you removed, but can you recall what was in your local Dropbox folder?
Kevin: My Dropbox folder contained the automatically-created subfolders and the three shared files in the jkOTR folder. Total available HD space dropped ~1.5 GB after installing Dropbox. None of the folders looked very large when checking their properties. However, after the uninstall and manual folder deletion my available HD space increased ~1.5 GB to within a few hundred MB of the available space before the install yesterday. I don’t understand why, but that’s what happened. I’ll post some HD metrics in the welcome.rtf file after installing Dropbox on my other computer.
I appreciate that it’s a beta… I just hope they go through a few more Greek letters before release.
I have seen other similar programs that use a hidden cache to store local changes to be synced when online. These caches can be quite large as they can result in several copies of all the files locally in the cache. That’s what it sounds like to me.
Kevin & James: As a follow-up to my previous comments I installed Dropbox on a second computer. The software did not significantly impact HDD space requirements — available space actually increased 1.9 GB during use. Directory statistics collected using WinDirStat suggest that the variation in reported space may be caused by Windows reclassifying known file types into unknown (and uncounted) space. This dynamic reclassification was probably responsible for “freeing” 1.5 GB on my laptop computer. Installing, using, and removing Dropbox seems to be unrelated.
Hi all, please, do you have free invitation? If yes, please, send it to libor.kriz(a)gmail.com … Thanks a lot!