Recommendation of the Week: Dropbox

From way back in the day someone, a real enthusiast of Open-Source software, had recommended that I should try Dropbox for cloud storage and I recall telling him that he was mad as hell if I ever thought of trusting someone with my information.

That was when Dropbox had just recently popped into the market.

Just recently, approximately 4 months ago, I decided to give Dropbox a try and I was surprised to see a 2 GB free option that could literally synchronize with every major OS and Smart Phone on this side of the planet.

The reason I mention this is because back then I was working as an IT Manager at a College and my computer was so resource limited I had to go for Linux, Debian with XFCE as a matter of fact so you can get an idea of how limited I was but putting it in Windows terms let us say that running Windows 2000 was my closest option to a stable and fast OS.

Back then I had this need to have files available on my computer back home, running Windows, and my computer at work, running Linux, and doing so with a USB was becoming a drag since I didn't want to lose important information, which has happened to all of us at some point, so I needed an alternative to this.

And I asked this friend of mine who reminded me Dropbox was an option and I can honestly say that so far it has been the best backup/cloud sharing software I've tried and believe me I've done several like Norton Ghost or Acronis up to Tape Backup, Zip Drive and USB and none had come in as easy as Dropbox.

Literally, just drop it on the folder and it synchronizes and you're done. It will appear on other computers you add to synchronization.

Best of this is that you get an additional 250MB when you finish doing the introduction steps and an additional 250MB for every person you invite that finishes doing their introduction to Dropbox.

So there I had it, Windows PC, Linux PC and my Blackberry, I had the files even on the go!

Only issue I ever had was trying to compile from source on Debian 5 but as soon as Debian 6 came to play, a month later after I began to use Linux as matter of fact, I just needed to install two more packages and I was ready to run the thing or even better, if you're running a console only box then you can use the script that they provide you, add it to the startup and as soon as you confirm you want to synchronize the PC it will do so. Neat!

Give it a try, you won't be dissapointed!