So, I’ve been using dropbox for a couple of weeks, and so far I’m impressed.

Yes, it reduces the irritation of having to email things to myself, or remembering to save onto USB key when I want to take a file somewhere, great 🙂

Possibly the best thing about it though, is being able to use it to send/share large files with others (https://www.getdropbox.com/tour#3).

My sister wanted a video she saw on my computer of one of the children the other day, and when I looked it was around 97 MB – too big to email.  Now, we could have found a USB key and copied it to that, but we decided to test out sharing on dropbox.  Here’s how we did it, and how you could too:

  1. I created a new folder called “Aunty” inside my dropbox:

    2. Create a new folder

  2. I right-clicked on the newly created folder and selected Dropbox > Share this folder…

    3. Share the folder

  3. This took me to the dropbox login page in my browser, where I entered my email address and password to log in.
  4. After logging in I was presented with a page headed “Share Aunty” (the name of the folder) where I could enter the email address of the person I wanted to share the folder with.  So I entered my sister’s email address.

    Enter collaborator's email address

    Ideally the email address you type would be the one they used to sign up to dropbox.  However, I think you can use any email address that you know they’ll receive (I haven’t tested this yet).  In fact, I don’t think they even need to have signed up to dropbox yet, they will just receive an invitation to do so if they haven’t.  I’ll post a comment when I know for sure.

  5. I then copied the file she wanted into the folder and after a few minutes uploading, we could see that it was synchronized on the dropbox server (the green checkmark shows that it’s synchronized).

    6. Synchronized Files

  6. As my sister had her dropbox set up already the “Aunty” folder just appeared in her dropbox.  Her computer downloaded (synchronized) the files in the folder automatically, so now we can just drag any file we want to share into that folder, and dropbox does the rest.

    As you can see this works with any type of file, large or small, so it’s great for sharing documents and photos too.If she’s using a different computer, without the dropbox client installed, she can just sign in to the website and download any files through the browser.

Try it out with your friends and family, and let me know how you get on!  If you register on this blog, you can post your comments below.

If you find that you need more space, see: Get more Dropbox space.

http://blog.pjwright.com/2009/08/28/get-more-dropbox-space/