Friday

Dropbox is Cool Tool for Syncing Docs on Multiple Computers

If you have a file on your desktop that you want to be able to work on from your laptop, or you want to be able to review from your smartphone, what do you do? Print it off and take it with you? That is just so 1990's. Well, there's an app for that, of course. It's called Dropbox and it works simply and beautifully.

The last few weeks we've been working on some presentation materials for some seminars coming up. Sometimes working at home, sometimes at the office, and sometimes while waiting for a court session to start. And every time, we were working on the same document and didn't need to update the copies that were stored on different devices or computers. That's what Dropbox does.

Dropbox is an internet service that has only one job. It will synchronize the contents of a single folder on multiple computers so that the contents of that folder are always the same. If you save a file in the Dropbox at work, it will show up on every other computer where you have installed Dropbox.

And if you left your laptop at home, you can use any laptop to access your Dropbox over the internet. Of course, there's an iphone app for it too.

The service is free and has a moderate cost above 2GB. But 2GB will hold a lot of documents, powerpoints, spreadsheets, etc. Folks, if you move around a lot and need to have portable docs with you that are up to date, this is one perfect way to do it.

Ron Burdge
Helping Lawyers Helping Their Clients, Since 1978