I’ve tried online synchronised storage in various forms before but recently after hearing it mentioned on the Boagworld podcast, I signed up for Dropbox.

Dropbox can be accessed through a web browser as you would expect and allows sharing permissions to be set up for folders. You can give access to other Dropbox users or publicly share files. The real simplicity of Dropbox is in the installed software which asks you to set up a folder on you local machine to be synchronised with the online storage. Once this is done – any changes made to files or sub-folders will be replicated on the server. You can install the software on several machines – Windows, Mac and Linux versions are available – for example I run Dropbox on my Home PC and my Work PC. I can download a document at work and save it into my Dropbox folder. If I don’t get time to read it, when I login at home, Dropbox will download the document into the synchronised folder on my home PC.

There’s an additional benefit for web developers:

Filenames and folder structures are retained intact in the online versions of the files so if you are developing html with linked pages, css files, javascript files and images, these pages will all work as intended if you share them from your Dropbox account. Additionally Dropbox automatically keeps versioned copies of any files in your folders allowing you to roll back any changes or view earlier versions of the files.

This is great for testing on other platforms or getting other people to review the work. Any tweaks that you make will be uploaded almost immediately, negating the need to manually upload files – this can seriously speed up the review process and avoid any forgotten images or new files.

The free account gives you 2GB of storage which can be upgraded to 50GB for $9.99 per month or $99 per year. If you ever find that you need to access files which you’ve left on a different computer, I recommend that you give Dropbox a try.

Update 17 Dec 08: Simon Collison has written a much more detailed review of Dropbox on his blog.