Dropbox is an online file storage upto 2GB, file sharing, online backup and file synchronizing service across your computers.
All you need is to download the client software, create your user account, link your computer to your account and move your files to the dropbox folder in your computer. Dropbox will automatically upload the files to their server.
While you are away, or need to check your files from a friend’s computer or from a browsing center, you can simply logon to the web client and download or view your files, or even upload any latest files. These files will also get synced on to your computers linked to dropbox. You can share your dropbox files across your Macs, PCs and Linux machines. All you need is to simply download the dropbox client and logon to your existing account.
You can have your own personal folder, or share folders with your friends, or have a public folder for access to anyone.
Dropbox client is officially supported on Windows XP and Vista, Mac OSX Tiger and Leopard, as well as Ubuntu 7.10+ and Fedora Core 9+, and several other distributions of Linux. The Ajax enabled Dropbox web version also supports Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari. Google Chrome is not supported at this moment.
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All transport of file occurs over SSL, and the files are encrypted with AES-256 before being stored on Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3). Dropbox works fine through HTTP(S) proxies. If your corporate network is behind an HTTP proxy servers that use NTLM authentication, use the open source ntlmaps. It will create an extra intermediate HTTP proxy on your local machine that Dropbox can connect to, and it will connect to your NTLM proxy server. Dropbox works behind a firewall as long as traffic is allowed over ports 80/443.
The free dropbox accounts will have the space limitation of 2GB. Dropbox is rolling out a premium plan of 50GB for $9.99/month, or $99.99/year. Files transferred to Dropbox via the client application have no limit to file size. However, maximum size of 350MB is set for files transferred through the web interface. Dropbox sorts files by size before syncing. Dropbox syncs only files which are added new. Before transfer, dropbox compares the new file to the previous version and only send the (binary) diff.
All your files are backed up and all prior versions are preserved. So if you delete something or even just save a bad change you can restore a file in a few clicks via the web interface.
When renaming a file in dropbox, dropbox considers it to be deleting the old file nad creating the new one. Your old file revisions will only be available in the Deleted Files section on the web interface.
The Dropbox client software silently updates itself as soon as an update is available.
Windows Live FolderShare & Sky Drive
Microsoft had released the beta version of Windows Live FolderShare. This helps keep files and folders across multiple computers (PC or Mac) that is connected to the Internet in sync with each other. The maximum size of individual files should not exceed 2 GB, and you can keep any number of files synced any time. In order for thsi to work, the client must be installed on every computer and connected to Internet for syncing. There is no online storage or backup for this service.
Windows Live SkyDrive stores your files online up to 5GB via the web browser. It is available from any computer with Internet access and a browser. You can create personal, shared, and public folders, rename them, or change who has access.
Dropbox is a combination of the FolderShare and Sky Drive features. If the FolderShare use the SkyDrive storage space as the online backup, this would perform great.
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