Hey Nick,
We use Dropbox a ton; here's why. I've never been a big fan of cloud storage-It's OK, but I've always had access to servers and such, so there didn't seem to be much of a point for someone in my situation. Dropbox, however, is a game changer. First, clients for everything. In my office alone we have it on Mac OSx, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, several flavors of Linux, iOS 3, iOS4 and Android 2.X. Second, there's the synching. On regular -- big -- machines such as desktops and laptops, Dropbox creates a mirror folder on your hard drive and synchronizes it with the cloud. Super useful for using multiple machines, backup, etc. Even better, it means backups on every machine AS WELL AS the cloud, so even if the cloud went away I'm still in good shape. Plus, multiple levels of undelete, logging of who did what, share control, etc. While this is a great strategy for hard drives, it's not so hot for the much tighter solid state storage on mobile devices. Here, Dropbox works in the opposite fashion-it creates what looks like a folder in your storage, but does NOT automatically synchronize the files. This has several advanatages: it allows you to access tons of stuff without using up your storage, for one. And it allows the Dropbox folder to appear as a usable drive to other programs, such as Docs to Go, so you can create docs on, say, your iPad and have them backed up/available for editing on your bigger hardware. There's a catch to this, obviously -- it doesn't work when you're offline. So how do you make stuff in your Dropbox available for, say, work on an airplane? Simple-you favorite it. So, bottom line: Great synching. Backup. Clients for pretty much everything. And if I'm in a meeting and need a doc I don't have I can pull it up on my Android phone. Recommended. cjf Christopher J. Feola President, nextPression Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/cjfeola From: friam-boun...@redfish.com [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Nicholas Thompson Sent: Sunday, November 28, 2010 5:56 PM To: russ.abb...@gmail.com; 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' Subject: Re: [FRIAM] dropbox? Russ, I just rummaged around on SkyDrive help pages and could find no sign that it sync-ed automatically. Any leads? Nick From: friam-boun...@redfish.com [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Russ Abbott Sent: Sunday, November 28, 2010 3:27 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] dropbox? I just looked up DropBox. Why is it better than other online file storage systems? For example, Google sites includes the means to store files, up to 10GB for free. (Dropbox includes only 2GB for free.) Windows Live SkyDrive includes 25GB free. (I think it syncs automatically if you have Windows 7.) Google sites seems to keep all versions of files so that one can retrieve previous versions. I haven't found a way to retrieve previous versions from SkyDrive and don't know if they keep them. The DropBox website didn't say anything about keeping previous versions. -- Russ On Sun, Nov 28, 2010 at 12:36 PM, Owen Densmore <o...@backspaces.net> wrote: Good info! gpg is new to me, so a question or two: - Do you use the pay Dropbox service? .. or just the free one? - Is gpg (http://www.gnupg.org/) easy to administer? Does it replace SSH key pairs? - Is gpg available fairly universally .. iPhone/Android, Mac/Win/Linux .. web hosting services? - What's gpg like to use? Sounds interesting. -- Owen On Nov 28, 2010, at 8:07 AM, Robert Holmes wrote: Owen - I work interchangeably on my office and home computers and I use Dropbox to keep particular parts of my setup synced between the two machines. In particular: 1. my to-do lists, engineer's notebook, big file o' passwords (gpg-ed, of course) and simple Python utilities all go into Dropbox & hence are always up to date and accessible; 2. my ever-growing collection of .PDFs of academic journals and papers goes into Dropbox so I can easily get it from any machine (and add to it from any of my machines). I do have Dropbox enabled on my Droid, but I don't think the Droid is terribly effective as an input device and its screen is just too small for comfortable viewing of PDFs, so I don't use it much for that. Handy in an emergency though. -- R On Sat, Nov 27, 2010 at 6:55 PM, Owen Densmore <o...@backspaces.net> wrote: Anyone on the list using dropbox a lot? I'm wondering if the iPad/iPhone app would be useful. -- Owen ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org <http://www.friam.org/> ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org <http://www.friam.org/> ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org <http://www.friam.org/>
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
