Dropbox - and how to make it work best...

I'm a big fan of Dropbox - been using it pretty much since it appeared as one of the earliest consumer cloud offerings and still do. There's plenty of competion for file sync and backup out there now, but Dropbox still tops the bill in many respects, not least for the speed at which it syncs. Last month's PC Pro concluded much the same. 

Don't know what I'm talking about? - then it's worth taking the tour. If you haven't come across this kind of thing before, do yourself a favour and take a minute to understand what these tools can do for you - this isn't about backup (although they're very useful for that if you don't do anything more robust) - but about making sure you can always get to the files you want on anything with an internet connection. PC, iPhone, iPad... anything with a web browser.

Dropbox isn't perfect, for the reasons the PC Pro review notes:

" In a way, Dropbox’s simplicity is a double-edged sword. On one hand, the concept of dropping files or folders into the Dropbox and knowing they’ll sync across all your devices is simple, and works brilliantly. On the other hand, there’s no way to sync specific files and folders – your Music folder, say – without moving them into the Dropbox, which doesn’t really suit the way Windows works. This limits Dropbox’s usefulness as a backup and restore program. "

But you can get around this in Windows, by changing the default locations of the 'Library' folders (in Windows 7) and the desktop.  I've been meaning to do this for a while, to ensure that Alison and the girls can use any PC in the house and find all their files, kept up to date, in the location they (and Windows) expect them to be.  I could do this with the tool I use to maintain backups in the house - the excellent Allway Sync - but I've always been reluctant to set up something as homespun as this inevitably would become. Making the files available across the web - something that Dropbox does as a matter of course - would be another level of complexity that I suspect that Al and the girls would struggle to engage with.

Dropbox gives you 2GB of storage for free, more if you're prepared to pay for it. This won't cover photos, videos and music for many - but it's likely to be more than enough for general, key office-type documents. In this house, it's enough for all of these document types for everyone except me, since I tend to collect the photos, music and video on one machine and then make them available to the others from a central location.  So Al and the girls were good candidates for a little config...

So, what did I do exactly?

Al's 'Library' folders - Documents, Video, Music, Pictures - have less than 1GB of data in them, I installed Dropbox, set up an account for her, and elected to put the Dropbox folder in C:\Users\Alison. Then I created 5 folders in the Dropbox folder - Documents, Pictures, Music, Video, Desktop. I copied all the content from the library folders into their matching location in the Dropbox folder.

Then I changed - with a right click on each one - the locations used by the library folders. 

The library folders now all sit IN the Dropbox folder - and Windows will use them by default.

I also went to Alison's user folder, right clicked on the Desktop shortcut and changed its location to the Desktop folder in Dropbox.  Windows helpfully offered to copy all the files over at the end of this process.

All of which achieves little in it's own right.  The key benefit is in making the same changes on my laptop, which Al uses just as much: It's possible to install Dropbox for every user on a PC as long as they have a separate login, which I kind of insist on: It's easy enough to set up, the girls get their own Hello Kitty / Moshi Monsters wallpaper and not doing it creates all sort of problems when you try and do this kind of thing.  It also stops the 5-year old from deleting all the family photos by 'just clicking, Daddy'.

So I made the same changes on my laptop for Al's login. And on the desktop I use in the attic and the netbook we take away with us. 

 I was so pleased with how well this worked, I did the same for the girls - Hatty has never generated a file in her life, but she will.  Abby has been happily saving things for a couple of years, in the Documents folder which Windows offers her by default, or on her desktop - the Documents and Desktop that are now in Dropbox and synced seamlessly everywhere. 

The end result? The girls can go to any PC in the house, log in and find all their files, synced and up to date, where they are on any other machine.  If their desktop is full of crap - and whose isn't? - they'll find the same crap on every machine. 

But there are other, real benefits:

Every file synced in Dropbox is synced via the cloud - which means you can access all your files IN the cloud from any machine with an internet connection: Very useful at work...

Dropbox maintains a full version history of every file - which means you can jump onto the web and restore an earlier version, or even recover files that you deleted days ago.

Dropbox makes the creation of a web photo gallery about as trivial as it could be:  Drop some photos in a folder in the Dropbox/Photos folder, right click on it, copy the Gallery link and send it to your friends. You don't even need to open your web browser!

And Dropbox has native apps for the iPad, iPhone, Android... Al can get to any file she's worked on at home, on her iPad or her phone.  Nothing to think about - all her files are just there.

There is one caveat to all this: If it's to work seamlessly, every device involved needs a network connection, probably an internet connection (Dropbox is clever enough to use a local network if it finds one).  This is why I regularly stress about my home WiFi.  Internet connectivity is an ESSENTIAL in the modern world - I can put up with the drought, just don't turn off the Internet...