Welcome back and if you came by to make a comment some of my comments get moderated but I'll get it moderated within a day unless I'm on vacation. I've got a new plugin that enables you to subscribe to comments to see if anybody comments on your comment. You'd hate for THEM to have the last word wouldn't you?
Sometimes I have a lot of files I need to share. Great gobs of user generated content I want other people to be able to get at, but I don’t want to e-mail to them… or just that they may not need right this minute, but they may want to get at later. Things that they might not ever need, but that I use and think they’d benefit from seeing. E-mailing these things to them is sometimes not practical or the best choice. Handing them a memory stick or burned CD or DVD isn’t going to work if they’re a zillion miles away.
Once upon a time I was a huge advocate of box.net as my primary source of file sharing. I have entire books of work forms and reference over there that I’ve shared with myself and a couple other supervisors in the company. It was my favorite, most suggested file sharing service. I could share with specific people or nobody or even make things public for anybody to access via a URL that didn’t expose all my files to the public. It was great.
Their upload functionality isn’t always what it should be though. I tried to upload multiple files last night and it just wouldn’t upload at all. I was kvetching about the upload problem to another box.net early adopter and he said that’s why he decided to give Dropbox a try and maybe it’d help with what I was looking for. I was trying to use the drag and drop interface to upload to box.net and it was letting me drag and drop, but it wasn’t doing the important part of the upload interface… the uploading. So, I signed up with Dropbox, installed a desktop client, drag-and-dropped my way into converting to a Dropbox fan in seconds. Talk about easy! Dropbox just displaced box.net as my favorite client because I can upload files to it without having to do it by hand, one at a time, while watching it. Drag files into the folder and go about my business. It uploads files in the background, and if I drag and drop the folders on the desktop client it does that on the online version. (I can’t find a way to organize files on the online client and that’s irritating, but I assume they’ll fix that in a later iteration for now I just organize them on my desktop version and it syncs it all up quickly and painlessly.)
So, if you need to share large files with someone consider Dropbox as a way to share little Johnny’s first steps on video or all those TPS reports you typed up. You won’t regret it.
The box.net & dropbox by Rich Griffith, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.