Last month, I was playing around with a service called Dropbox. The name of the site pretty much tells you what it basically is, a service that allows you to drop files into a folder on your computer and it syncs it up onto the cloud (the internet) for access there.

When you first install the application, it puts a folder in your Documents directory called My Dropbox. This is where all your files go to get synced with the server, and it is also where files that get put into your Dropbox get downloaded to. When uploading files to the web, I found it to be quite slow, and when I say slow, I mean that my connection can handle a fair bit more. The other issue I had here was that the program wasn’t very good at telling me the progress of my upload, as well as the speed it was going. It was very inaccurate and most of the time, looked as if it had stalled.

You also have a public folder which is a folder that you can publicly share the files in, as long as you give the link to the people you want to share with. You can also share other folders too. You can view and download files using a web browser by logging on to your Dropbox account and you have access to all your files from there. You can also share folders with other Dropbox users. There you have a common folder and it appears on both peoples Dropbox’s and when anyone adds a file to it, it will automatically sync with the other people.

My only real grip was with the uploading of files to the Dropbox. There are still many ways in which this service can grow. The storage is limited to 2GB per user, and depending on how many files you have, and how much you want synced to the internet, this could be a huge limitation for some people. The service could also improve with backup. At the moment, it is only good at backing up individual files, and even then, there are services out there that do it a lot better.

There are many features that I have missed mentioning and overall, Dropbox is an amazing service. It does what it does reasonably well. I am really looking forward at seeing what they do to improve this service and make it a real competitor in the online storage/sync/backup space. If you would like to try it out, I have 9 invitations, and you can get one by commenting below. If you haven’t already, please do try out this great service.