For the last two months, I’ve been working with a cloud sync tool, called Dropbox. They have a very unfortunate URL (http://www.getdropbox.com), but the service they provide is pretty amazing. For the free account, you get 2GB of file space to link to your computer. The installer sets up a folder on your machine, appropriately called Dropbox, and anything you put into that folder gets synced up to the Dropbox’s servers. There’s a very handy web interface that goes along with the account, allowing you to look at files, share folders with other users or the internet at large – and restore previous versions of a file. Dropbox can do this previous versions magic because it saves changes to files, not just new versions.

The wicked part of Dropbox, that makes it so useful to me, is that you can sync with an unlimited number of client machines. And it’s cross platform (Mac, Windows, Linux). So, the contents of your Dropbox are saved on each of the computers, providing you with a mirror of your data across multiple machines. And, like it does with the multiple versions, it only sends the changes down to the other clients. For example, if you have a word document that has grown to many many MB in size, and you change a single line of text, Dropbox won’t re-send the whole file. It just sends the change to the clients. This makes it very handy, and very unobtrusive, and fast, even over slow connections.

They have a wicked screencast as well, that really makes the whole thing make more sense, and shows of the power and simplicity of the service.

This is great, because even if Dropbox goes offline, or closes up shop, all your data is still on your computers. You don’t lose it into the cloud. Further, if you have client machines seperated by decent distances (like a home and an office computer, both linked to Dropbox), if your house burns down, all the files in Dropbox are still around. This thought got me to start putting lots of my important files into Dropbox – especially the encrypted ones. This way, I’ve got a nice, handy backup of my system keychains, home folder settings, web browser home pages, and other critical data. I’m working on a set of shell scripts (to sync between OSX desktops) that will set things the way I like – for example, turning off the 3D dock in Leopard.

Today I installed a new build of DropBox on my home computer, and noticed they’ve put in a link for account upgrades, which is the reason I’m writing this post at all. Before, we Dropbox users were limited to 2GB of space in the cloud. Now, for $9.99/month (or $99.00/year) we get 50 GB of space, which makes Dropbox a large enough bucket to backup nearly all of my work-related documents. I can’t pretend to try to put my pictures in Dropbox (my Aperture library alone is over 200 GB), but I can do a decent job with my home folder. As soon as I find a way to encrypt the data I want to sync seamlessly, I’l going to put the hammer down and get the 50GB account.