Lady Geek’s Program of The Day: Dropbox

Tales of the Lady Geek

Hello, Lady Geek here with today’s installment of the tales of my technological life. As of this writing, I am sitting in the ‘cafeteria’ section of Philadelphia’s famed 30th Street Station, today’s outfit of choice geared more towards ‘Earth Mother’ than “Professional Woman”, but looking fabulous just the same. It’s lunch time and I’m watching crowds of people rush back and forth holding hurried conversations on their phones, moving among the tables filled with men and women in various forms of dress, a lot with their laptops, tablets and phones all going at once. They look very important.

The purpose of my being here is purely mercenary.  At one of these tables, very shortly, someone is going to start pounding away at their keyboard with an extremely frustrated look and I’ll be there to sort it out and make some quick cash for the Christmas fund, maybe even get a new contract for my business. Hey, in this economy, we all have to put our hustle gene to extra work and I have four GIT’s (Geeks In Training) that give me just the level of motivation my hustle gene requires to go. Which brings me around to today’s topic.

The Lady Geek’s Favorite Program of the Day: Dropbox

Dropbox

According to a recent Marketwatch survey, “Dropbox emerged from 2011, as not only one of the most popular startups of recent memory, but also as the most loved topic on social media, according to Amplicate’s annual review of the most loved and hated topics on social media. Ninety Nine percent of comments about the cloud computing firm were positive, making Dropbox more popular than Jesus Christ.”

What Is It?

For those of you who’ve never heard of it, Dropbox’s story goes like this:

Once upon a time in 2007, a fresh young MIT student named Drew Houston had a couple of problems, the first was that he was growing frustrated by working from multiple computers and saving his work on his second problem. The thumb drive he was always losing. Being the MIT type of geek that he was and growing increasingly frustrated by working from multiple computers, Drew created a service that would let people bring all of their files anywhere. After he created a demo he showed it to a fellow MIT student named Arash Ferdowsi who was so impressed that he decided to drop out of MIT with only one semester left in order to help develop what we know today as Dropbox.   

What it Does

According to Wikipedia.com, “Dropbox is a Web-Based file hosting service that uses cloud storage (Cloud computing is a general term for anything that involves delivering hosted services over the Internet) to enable users to store and share files and folders with others using file synchronization.”

Basically, Dropbox is an application that allows you to sync your folders to one universal folder that you can then access from any computer and most phones. So, say that you have about two gigabytes of pictures from Auntie May’s annual Rock ‘em Sock ‘em Robot fest that you never quite got around to printing. All of a sudden you’re at Granny Ruth’s house and she demands to see that picture of Uncle Ricky and Auntie Rain bobbing for robots. All of your files are at home, you have no copies of the pictures, and Granny won’t give you a single slice of her famous sweet potato pie if you don’t show her right now, but you notice that you do have your phone. With a simple swipe of your finger all of the pictures are now available for Granny to look at while you eat that yummy slice of pie and all is now right with your world.

Why Dropbox?

As with a lot of really cool software, there are tons of similar ones both free and paid with varying options that I’ve experimented with throughout the years. What makes Dropbox stand out to me is the usability. Its simple interface and synchronization of my data, the easy to follow instructions and the fact that since I’ve been using it, I no longer need to worry about my most valuable writings and photos. Dropbox is so easy to use that while you’re installing it, a friendly little interface pops up with three straightforward steps to using it.

1. “Your Dropbox is a special folder on your computer. Simply drop in files and they will instantly be available on any of your other computers and the web.”
2. “If you need to access your files from someone else's computer, simply login to www.dropbox.com.  You can view, download, and upload your files securely from any web browser.”
3. “A green arrow on your screen shows the location of the Dropbox notification area icon.  Click the icon to quickly open your Dropbox folder, access the Dropbox website, find help and information, and change your Dropbox preferences. You can share any folder in your Dropbox with friends or colleagues, even if they use a different operating system from you.”

There you go! All of your user questions are answered while you’re installing it, easy peasy just the way I like my software.  

Dropbox comes in four flavors: 

Basic: 2GB of storage for free

Pro 50: 50GB of storage for $9.99/month

Pro 100: 100GB of storage for $19.99/month

Teams: 1TB of storage that starts at $795 for five users.

Final Thoughts

Using Dropbox for personal use is handy and less cumbersome than keeping everything in hard copy or worrying about where that pesky little thumb drive went off to. It allows you limitless access to your files, is useful for students, business people and Regular Joe’s who are savvy enough to want to protect their data from unexpected system failures.

For businesses, Dropbox allows you to share your files easily with clients and colleagues thus giving you the ability to access your projects on the fly, see and make changes to your files instantly as well as keeping everyone on the same page with the progression of your projects. This makes Dropbox the ultimate headache remover for business.

The best part about Dropbox is that when you change a file and move to synchronize the folders, instead of hogging up your bandwidth you can set limits that keep it under control, and instead of taking valuable time saving an entire folder all over again for one change, the program only transfers the changed parts of your file.

Dropbox is so easy to use, is priced just right, is so organized, clean and especially pretty to look at, that I find it nearly impossible to remember if there was a time I wasn’t happy with it.  This being said, I have to recommend that everyone at least give it a try, you’re bound to be as happy as I am with it.

Written by Maryann Paris