Dropbox just works.

For the last month I have been experimenting with a remote folder synchronisation service called Dropbox to help me with my increasingly nomadic working life. I work for a charity for some of my week and for a PR company for the rest of my time, doing both across a number of offices and home. This provides me with some conundrums when moving my work as digital files, not least of which is that I run OS X at home and Windows XP almost everywhere else.

As the world is not a neat and compartmentalised place, I need to be able to access password lists, pitch documents and draft reports in any of the contexts in which I work. I have tried a number of solutions over the years, including:

• a hard-shell ABS plastic case that held four floppy discs and could float around inside my shoulder bag in relative safety - but that was a few years ago ;-)
• a memory stick, that I kept forgetting or loosing, as well as having file format issues between System 9/OS X and Windows 2000;
• a webdav share on my hosting service that required enough setup on each machine so as to be just inconvenient enough for me not to use properly. It was also not exactly secure;
• and in a fit of pique, a series of notebooks (my favourites are from Muji, but that is another post) in which I wrote down all those important little configuration settings, etc. And if I lost one of those...

So when I came across Dropbox I was both curious and somewhat cautious. Dropbox is web service that uses desktop software to share designated folder on your desktop - Mac or Windows - which it synchronises via a web based service .

The highest complement that I can pay it is that It Just Works. Installation on both Windows and OS X is a doddle and for those occasions when I am on a machine without a user account, it has a web interface as well. I get 2Gb of storage and if I need more, I can buy 50Gb for $99 a year.

I have yet to try sharing files between different DropBox accounts, but I am hoping that I can create a sort of very slow, distributed file server with my friends at Wolfstar in Leeds. Even across my rather ordinary broadband it syncs across my various instances at a very acceptable rate. I will write further when I have tried replacing Wolfstar's Windows 2003 file server with a dozen or so DropBox accounts.