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Toolbox: How Are You Even Surviving Without Dropbox?
h4. Hey sailor, welcome to Toolbox. This is the place where Motherboard’ll be telling you every week about this or that bit of software that you really need to have on your computer or phone-computer now. Requirements for something to be in our toolbox...
It's OK, I used to be like you. I'd shuttle documents and crap around on thumb drives; I'd jam enormous raw files into e-mails to work on elsewhere; I'd put music on my iPhone just to transport it to my home computer. It was all pretty stupid and I didn't know any better until someone sent me a mixtape packaged by Dropbox. It was irritating: I had to sign up for it, download it, and install it. The whole process took a whole, like, five minutes and left a thing on my desktop.Then I forgot about Dropbox until I needed to send myself an album and was prepping to try and remember which .zip sending service (Mediafire et al.) is less of a hassle. Then I remembered Dropbox. I could just download the program again on the other computer and, wow, it'd be like a portal between the two computers (actually a shared cloud-based storage drive between two computers).That's that. You get 2 GB of storage for free, which seems fine so long as you're not keeping things there for the long-term. Which maybe you should: it's a quick, simple backup solution as well. For ten and twenty bucks you can get 50 GB and 100 GB, respectively. Which seems rather steep to tell you the truth, seeing that I get unlimited storage at Flickr for about $2 a month. Apples and oranges, I guess.If you were so inclined, however, for that $20 you could have your own music cloud server. It’s a pretty simple matter of directing multiple iTunes to the same shared Dropbox folder. Note that you can direct an unlimited number of computers to that folder, which is cool. Also cool: it has an iPhone app, so no more e-mailing iPhone pics to yourself.Download Dropbox here.Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.