Why I absolutely love Dropbox

I’m going to be upfront here. I love Dropbox so much, I want more disk space on my account. If you sign up using my referral code, both you and I get an additional 250MB added to the 2GB default disk space. Dropbox is free by the way.

With my greedy ambition out of the way, here’s why I’m totally sold on Dropbox. Its concept is simple: You get a folder called Dropbox and whatever you files you throw in it gets encrypted and incrementally synced over your Internet connection to their servers and your other computers.

In other words the document I’m working on right now gets synced to my colleagues, can be downloaded from the web, and is replicated on my other computers the very moment I hit the Save button. Yes, when you hit Save. Not at the end of the day, not on some ridiculous schedule in the wee hours of the morning. Immediately when you hit save. It’s backup, sharing, collaboration all rolled into one amazing free package.

The world’s simplest backup
Backup has always been one of my biggest dissatisfaction with modern computing. I’ve tried everything from RAID hard disks and rsync, to Apple’s Time Machine and Carbonite. None of these beat Dropbox.

Dropbox sits quietly in the background doing all the hard work for you. No prompts, no reminders, just quietly syncing all my files. Today, I don’t use a Documents folder, I have everything in my Dropbox folder. This way, the moment I save my work it’s well synced to the cloud. Perfect.

No more attachments
The other thing I’m beginning to like about Dropbox is how it’s putting an end to attachments. I often meet new clients who want our slides, or case studies and instead of attaching a new copy to every single client, I give them a link to my file on Dropbox.

While Dropbox keeps all my files secure and private, it allows me to keep a Public folder which is open to everyone. Every file in this Public folder is given a unique URL from which others can download from.

The concept here is very similar to what can be achieved on YouSendIt and Box.net, but since I’m already on Dropbox, it makes it all the more seamless.

Putting your mind at ease
Using Dropbox is like using Gmail I feel. It puts your mind at ease knowing that you’ll always be able to access your files from the cloud.

Dropbox is only free with up to 2GB of space, which is enough for me now, but a 50GB account only costs $99/year which I’m inclined to get when I’m out of space.

Try it, I’m almost sure you’ll like it as much as I do. If you do, I’ll appreciate you using my referral code so we both get a little more of this wonderful service.

(While this post sounds amazingly positive, I swear that no form of compensation was given to me. I’m just a very happy fan.)