Tag: Cloud Services

Cloud Services Revisited – Part 4 – Dropbox

A few years ago, I wrote a series of articles describing “Cloud Services” that offered some great functionality like Offsite Backups, Password Storage with LastPass, and Note taking with Evernote for little to no money and showed how you could use the Internet for more than web browsing.  Today I’ll describe a service called Dropbox that was mentioned briefly in the backups article, but which deserves an article of its own.


At it’s core, Dropbox allows you to put all your commonly used files on your computer but also have them instantly and automatically copied to the dropbox website and to any of your other computers!  Together, the Dropbox website and all of your computers make up your Dropbox Cloud. Let’s say you have a work laptop and a  desktop at home.  When you save something on your laptop, the changes will be copied to your desktop and to the Dropbox website (protected by a login and password of course), all automatically.  One of the best things about Dropbox is that you don’t have to have Internet access all the time to use it.  It can’t update your Dropbox Cloud until you get back online, but once you do reconnect, any changes you’ve made in the meantime are sent immediatly.

Macintosh Menu Bar
Mac Menu Bar
Windows System Tray
Windows System Tray

Dropbox does all this by installing a small program on your computer.  To have a file included in your Dropbox Cloud, simply save them into your Dropbox folder. This is usually inside your Documents folder, but you can put it anywhere.  Anything that you put in this folder, pictures, movies, Word docs, other folders, all of these things will be automatically synced to your cloud.

One way we use this in our house is for the kids’ computer work.  The kids are constantly moving between my computer, my wife’s computer, and the family machine.  By creating a folder for each of the kids in Dropbox and sharing that folder between my account and my wife’s account, anything the kids save will be automatically copied to every computer in the house.

File History

Speaking of kids, you may have experienced the heartbreak of losing changes when someone overwrites your novel or the family budget spreadsheet.  Dropbox stores the last 8 versions of every file in the Dropbox folder.  When you realize that your file has mysteriously changed to a bunch of gibberish, just go to the Dropbox website, right click the file and choose Previous versions.  You’ll see the last 8 versions and the date they were last saved.  Then you can choose the version you want.  A great way to recover work you thought was gone forever!  You can even restore deleted files!

Sharing

I mentioned my wife and I share the kids folder between our accounts, and sharing is a great feature of Dropbox.  There are two ways to go about this.  Send them a link to a file, or Share with them.  In the first case, you can make files and/or folders in your Dropbox downloadable by others, even if they don’t have a Dropbox account.  Just right click and choose share a link to get a URL you can give to anyone who can then see those files.  This allows for a simple way to let someone see a group of photos or get around email attachment issues.
When you share a folder or file, the other person will need to have a Dropbox account, or signup for one.  You right click and choose Share This Folder and then add the email address you want to share with.  They’ll get a message to agree to the share or create an account, and from then on you can both edit the files and changes will be synced between both accounts.  Full collaboration details are on the Dropbox site.

Photos and Videos

Recently, Dropbox has been adding a bunch of Photo and Video features.  They now include a central place to view all the pictures in your Dropbox Cloud, photo album creation, and you can upload pictures straight from your mobile phone or tablet.  More on the mobile tools later, but selecting a few photos or folders you can add them to an album and easily share the album with anyone you choose.  When it comes to letting people see the photos from your vacation or trip, this is about as easy as it gets.

Mobile

If you have a smart phone, Dropbox is a great way to get to the files you’ve been working with from anywhere.  Install the app and browse your files, when you need a file click it and it will download to your phone.  To make sure that you can get to it even when you don’t have a connection, mark it as a favorite.  A special feature of the mobile app is Camera Upload. This will allow you to automatically upload all the pictures you take on your phone to Dropbox where you can move them wherever you want.  Much simpler than some of the photo management tools on smart phones.

Get Free Space

Dropbox comes with 2 GB of free space, which you can stretch a long way, but there are ways to get more.  You can purchase extra space if you want or get free space by going through their tutorial and referring others to Dropbox.  You can also get extra free space if you are a student and have a “.edu” email address.  In full disclosure, the links to Dropbox in this article are referral links and we get extra free space when you signup through those links.  It doesn’t change our enthusiasm for Dropbox, and thanks for helping us out!  Dropbox has truly become a central part of how our family works on the computer.  We don’t worry about lost work, schlepping files around on thumb drives, or collaborating together on projects.

Cloud Services Revisited – Part 3 – Every note in the cloud

In our 3 part series on using the cloud for everyday things you need, we’ve covered backups and passwords, now we’ll cover the simple act of note taking.  The service I’m talking about is a tool/service called Evernote. Evernote is both a web service and a piece of software.  In brief it is a place to take notes that will automatically back them up and make them available through a website and a local client, but it’s much more than that.  It can change the way you keep track of everything from Meeting notes and magazine articles to your bills.

Continue reading “Cloud Services Revisited – Part 3 – Every note in the cloud”

Cloud Services Revisited – Part 2 – Passwords

In Part 1 of this three part series, we talked about using Cloud Services for backups.  In Part 2, we’ll talk about how you can use the cloud to keep track of the myriad passwords you end up collecting and how you can start creating better passwords to protect you from attacks.  All this without risking storing your passwords in the open on someone else’s server, and always giving you a secure way to download a local backup.

Most of us have accounts all over the Internet, and most of them use some kind of username and password to let us access our account.  It may seem that the only way to keep track of them is to use the same password for most of the accounts.  Maybe you use a different one for your bank and a few other places, but it just becomes impossible to remember a different password for each site.  You could keep them all on Post-Its along your monitor, but hopefully you know that’s not a good idea.  So using a tool of some sort is a great way to get around this.  Several years ago I started using the password manager built into my browser to track passwords, and it was a great burden lifted.  I still used the same username and password on many sites, simply because I was lazy and didn’t want to create a new one.  But I used harder passwords more often and they were all remembered for me.  About a year ago, I started using a free service call LastPass to keep track of my passwords, and it has changed the way I work with passwords forever.

Continue reading “Cloud Services Revisited – Part 2 – Passwords”

Cloud Services Revisited – Part 1 – Backups

Last year, I wrote an article about using the cloud for backups and doing it securely.  There have been some big changes in the area since then, and I wanted to return to it and update some of my recommendations and add some new tools to the mix as well.  This is part 1 of a three part series on using Cloud Services.  Part 1 will revisit backups, Part 2 will cover storing passwords securely in the cloud, and Part 3 will show you how to keep track of every thought that crosses your mind and make it available anywhere, all through the cloud. Continue reading “Cloud Services Revisited – Part 1 – Backups”

How I learned to love the cloud (at least for backups)

If you haven’t heard of “the cloud”, you probably haven’t been paying attention to all of the online services that are cropping up online.  If you’ve used Flickr, Facebook, Gmail, Hotmail, or any of the thousands of online tools available today, you’ve used the cloud.  It’s a way of saying that the things you put on those sites are stored “somewhere”, but you don’t know, or need to care, where it’s stored.  It’s just in the clouds.  I’ve always been a little hesitant of putting things “in the cloud”.  Continue reading “How I learned to love the cloud (at least for backups)”