Thursday, March 31, 2011

Dropbox: Friend of the Writer

Aside from writing this blog, I am also a writer of fiction (among other things). I've tried the past few years to find away to keep my drafts all up to date in the same place. I have to move from home computers to work, to the phone, to the iPad and to have to manually move files from one place to the next was always a disaster in the making.

So a couple months ago I found Dropbox. Not only does it save your stuff in the cloud, it also keeps all that stuff up to date on all the rest of the machines you've attached to your Dropbox.

Now I can access all my files and work on them at any time, on any machine, anywhere. Just thinking about that makes my shoulders relax. Check it out.

2 comments:

  1. Amazon has their free 5 gb Cloud Drive(http://goo.gl/tlkQs) if you need more storage. And Google Documents is handy in a pinch, of course.

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  2. I tried working off Google docs before I found Dropbox. The conversion process never really treated my stuff well and it was almost impossible to work on google docs on the iPad. Maybe it's changed, but Dropbox is seamless. I like being able to work on the files in their natural form.

    I'm a little skeptical of the Amazon cloud music thing. There are other companies who've tried it and the big problem is it takes a dog's age to upload a significant amount of stuff. And, at $20 a year for 20gb, I'd need to spend about $400 a year to get all my music on there. Not to mention streaming to the phone from the cloud will kill any but the most stout data plans. And I'm dubious of the sound quality of streaming from the cloud...well who knows. It's perfect for the casual user, but not at all a service for a serious music fan.

    As an option for 5gb of general purpose cloud storage, yeah it's a decent deal.

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