How to Use Dropbox to Enable a Mobile Lifestyle

Introducing Mickey Hadick:
Mickey makes his living as a Business Analyst in the insurance industry, and has spent his career with information technology. If you’d like to learn from his mistakes, visit MickeyHadick.com where he blogs and tells stories in his spare time.

I am a recent convert to Dropbox, a cloud service for synchronizing the contents of computer folders. It’s clever beauty resides in it’s ability to notice that a file has been added, updated, or deleted and immediately makes the change on the server’s copy of your file folders.

It’s magic happens when you install Dropbox on any, and all, computers that you use. Dropbox copies the changes from the server back to those other computers. A common scenario is you have a netbook computer you keep in a briefcase, a laptop in the dining room, and one or more desktops scattered around the house. The kids may already take turns on the better desktop computer so that they can keep up with their friends online, so you need to wait until later in the evening before you can access that machine to design and print an invitation. However, thanks to Dropbox, you can compose some of the content on your netbook during the day and later revise the text and begin to layout the design on your laptop in the dining room after dinner. The work begun on the netbook is automatically pushed to the laptop once the Dropbox software connects to the cloud. Those updates will then get pushed to the desktop machine when it is your turn to use it, where you can finalize the invitation.

The file synchronization happens automatically and without the need for flash thumb drives or e-mailing attachments to yourself. As quickly as you move from one computer to the next, the documents in the designated folders are moved for you, allowing you to worry about the content, and not the transport, of the document.

Dropbox offers a 2GB account for free, with opportunities to expand that slightly by sharing the service with friends. 2GB may not seem like a lot these days, but for documents you create yourself, it’s should be enough to accomplish a great deal of work. Larger amounts of storage can be bought, and you may want to keep cherished photos or beloved music in those folders as well so that they are backed up in the cloud and on all of your computers.

The Dropbox service allows you to approach certain creative work differently, making it available to you throughout your day, wherever you are connected to the Internet. I often make use of a twenty minute session at a coffee shop near where I work during the day, and what I type on my netbook is safely backed up to the cloud within seconds of saving my work.

When I take one of my children to an activity in the evening, I may continue my own creative efforts while waiting for them. This makes me feel empowered and more in control of my life. I have the option of making progress on my project, whatever it may be, or watching their activity. Having that option makes me happy.

If I find myself in a place without one of my computers, but still have access to the Internet, I can log into Dropbox and access my folders from the cloud. So I don’t feel compelled to drag a machine with me everywhere.

A netbook is small, but an iPad is even smaller, yet it is fully capable of using Dropbox and staying synchronized with your document folder. If you crave a mobile lifestyle but want to stay connected to your home computers, Dropbox and a tablet make a powerful combination.

The Dropbox tour of features is available here (https://www.dropbox.com/tour). I currently make do with the free amount of storage, but I am contemplating keeping some cherished photos and videos there.

If you are a Dropbox fantard like me, let us know how you use it!