My beta invitation for DROPBOX showed up today!
I heard about Dropbox on a podcast quite a while back. I immediately went to the website and signed up for an invite. I completely forgot about it until this morning when an invite appeared in my inbox.
The best way I can describe Dropbox is "Global network-attached storage on steroids". That's my quote but I give you permission to use it.
If you have a home or work computer network, then surely you're aware of the benefits of network-attached storage. You can share files among many computers. There's always a backup in case your computer crashes. Several people can access and work on a file.
The only downside is that you MUST be attached to that network in order to access the files. Dropbox changes that by making the "drive" available to any computer anywhere in the world (as long as you have internet access).
Once installed on your computer you will always see the Dropbox icon in your taskbar.
Double-click the icon to access your dropbox folder. This looks like any other folder in Windows. Well, yours may look different if you have Vista. I'm still rocking XP on my EIGHT-YEAR-OLD Vaio. You can drop any file into this main folder. The "Photos" folder is obviously for your photos. The "Public" folder is where you can drop any file that you want others to be able to get access to.
I dropped this test image into the "Public" folder and it uploaded to the server immediately. Keep in mind that it's a very small file.
Now that a file is in the "Public" folder, sharing is easy. Right click the file, select 'Dropbox' from the menu, select "Copy public link". This will copy a url to your clipboard that you can now insert into emails, IMs or websites. You can click on the following image to view it full size.
The other cool part is that Dropbox keeps backups of all files and revisions. That really helps if you delete a file that you shouldn't have. It's also nice if you're collaborating on a file and the other person messes something up and you need to revert to an earlier version.
My beta invite came with 2gb of storage space and 10 invites to hand out to the people of my choosing. Naturally I'm unable to "sell" my invites. You may want to donate a few dollars to me by clicking the link on the sidebar. I may (will) thank you by sending an invite your way if they're still available. The nice part about getting now is that when they go live (paid), the beta users will have more free space than the regular free users that get into the game late. Read about it on their FAQs page.
At this time, I have 1 invite left.
