In regards to school, my biggest fear is walking around campus all day with my fly down. Second to that, however, is the fear that a paper I’ve worked on for x amount of time (in my darkest nightmares, x = all semester long) being lost. While only mindfulness will address my former concern, I believe that I have found the solution to the latter: Dropbox.
This semester, when I need to be able to track changes, add comments, and manage sources, I realized that Google Documents was woefully underpowered. However, I had become accustomed to many of Google Docs unmatched (by Word) features: The ability to access my files from any Internet-enabled machine; No need to merge changes across multiple documents; The ability to share the latest version of my work.
Enter Dropbox. Dropbox is an application that runs on both Windows and Mac which synchronizes files across multiple machines automatically. So, to address my fear of losing my work, plus mirror the features I loved in Google Documents, I saved my paper to my Dropbox folder. That’s it. Any time I edit and save that file, it automatically pushes the file up to the server, which then pushes it down to my other machines.
Dropbox also makes recovering from late-night editing sessions (the ones where I realize late the next day how stupid my writing was) by saving previous versions of my work. If I somehow corrupt my file, no worries: I can revert to the older, working version.
If I want to share the document I’m working on with my wife, I can either create a new shared folder, or place the file (again, all locally) in a “Public” folder and then send her the link. And, with 2GB of space (upgradeable with subscription) I’ve got plenty of room for my school documents.
There are plenty of other uses for Dropbox (included below in the links section), but from the student perspective, this is probably the most direct, easiest, and most useful. Now, all that remains is to work on a “Fly down” indicating buzzer.
Related Links (aka Other reasons to consider using Dropbox):
- Dropbox
- Sync Dropbox w/ Flash Drive
- Start bittorrent Downloads at Home from any Computer
- Sync Bookmarks Across Computers
- Password Syncing
