DropBox Review

• Features
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• Likes
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• Dislikes
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• User Reviews
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• Where to Buy

DropBox Features/Benefits

Dropbox is a technology startup and software product that was publicly launched in 2008 and is well-funded by Suquoia Capital and Accel Partners. Since then, Dropbox has attracted over a million users and is growing rapidly. Dropbox has revolutionized the way people access their files, making it easy to securely share files with other people, sync them across multiple computers, and access them from anywhere, while keeping them safe.

Likes

Syncs Multiple Computers: Dropbox offers extremely easy and complete syncing that allows you to manage files across multiple computers. Dropbox creates a folder on each machine that you simply drag or copy/paste files and folders into and the synchronization starts immediately. Any files and folders that you drop into your Dropbox folder automatically upload to the remote Dropbox Amazon’s S3 storage. You can manage files within this folder just like elsewhere on your machine (add, edit, copy, and delete them) and changes will be automatically synced to Dropbox’s remote server and automatically reflected on all other computers on which you have Dropbox installed and linked to.

Easily Restores Deleted Files: Simply go to the Dropbox web interface, and request to show all deleted files. From there, you can restore any deleted files, as they will still reside on the Dropbox servers. All files are version controlled so you can revert to an earlier version of a document, or restore it completely when lost. Dropbox not only backs up the latest version of your files but also preserves copies of all previous versions.

Works on Different Operating Systems: Dropbox offers smooth operation on various cross operating systems such as Windows, Mac and Linux. Dropbox is one step ahead of the game here as most of the services we reviewed do not support Linux.

Dropbox Web Interface: The web interface provides allows you to get access to your files from any device, anywhere with a web browser – including mobile phones.

Sharing Features: You can share a folder with anyone, simply by navigating to “Share Folder”. That will take you to the web interface where you can enter email addresses for anyone you would like to have access for downloading, adding or deleting files. If you need to share files to non-Dropbox users, you can do so by dropping files into your “Public Folder”. Any files in here will be given a link that you can send to others in emails, IMs, blogs, etc. without requiring people to sign up for Dropbox. A similar feature with another subfolder called “Photos” lets you send a link to a Public Gallery that anyone can use to view any photos you’ve copied into it.

Encrypted Files: Your files are always safe. All transport of file data and file metadata occurs over SSL and encrypted with AES-256 before being stored.

Dislikes

No Private Encryption Key: Other online storage providers offer encrypted passwords as an additional security measure. DropBox plans to eventually allow users to provide their own private key, however this feature is not yet available.

No Syncing of Open and Locked Files: With Windows, Dropbox doesn’t sync files that are open and locked by other applications. While it may technically possible to sync locked files, these applications don’t typically react well to files being replaced or modified while locked. Dropbox will only sync once the lock is released or once the application is closed. We don’t see this as a huge issue, though as most online storage providers will have a similar issue – and syncing will occur as soon as the file is closed.

Syncs Files in Dropbox Folder only: Having a single place to drop your files for syncing can be convenient. However with Dropbox, users cannot sync folders that are outside the Dropbox folder. You are required to keep all your shared, backed-up, and synced files in a single and specific folder and only then will it be replicated on other devices where the software is installed. This can lead to incomplete backups/synchronizations if you are not careful about placing all necessary files in the Dropbox folder. Dropbox’s makers promise to correct in a future version.

Limitation on File Sizes: Dropbox limits files uploaded through its web interface to 300MB; this may not be large enough to accommodate many photo albums or graphic presentations. If you use the dropbox desktop interface however there isn’t any limitation.

Email support only: For a product with the features and fucntionality of Dropbox, we’d like to see a few more customer service options available besides email and a forum.

  Where to Buy

• Try 2GB of DropBox Free!

  Summary

We find Dropbox to be an extremely simple program that offers fully featured online storage features. Some of the best features include maintaining copies of deleted files via the web interface and providing access to past versions of edited files. You can also manage to sync folders between multiple computers and it stands out from a lot of its competitors by offering compatibility with Linux systems.

Dropbox makes a promise to its users to correct its limitations in the near future and is striving to provide a much better and brighter online storage service to its valued customers. However at this time we find other solutions such as SugarSync, that provide as good if not better solutions.