A relatively new category of online services that are popular with home users should be better-known among small and medium-sized businesses. Why? Because they effortlessly solve two important computer problems. And even better, they do so for little or even no money.
One of the problems is that old devil back-up; no adult needs to be reminded of the importance of keeping more than one copy of important files, preferably in more than one location. The other challenge is one experienced by anyone who works from several computers during the course of the day--at the office, in the study at home, in the bedroom upstairs--and who find himself e-mailing files back and forth so that he'll always be working with the latest version.
With the cost of setting up a small data center slowly declining, entrepreneurs have been starting companies to address these concerns. This is a busy area; Wikipedia's list of these offerings is here. I use Dropbox. So unobtrusively and elegantly does it do its job that the service should be taught as a model to programming students.
The process couldn't be simpler. Download and install the free software from Dropbox.com--there are versions for Windows, Mac, Linux and the iPhone--and then reboot your computer. When you are back up and running, you'll see that a new My Dropbox folder has been created. This is like any other folder; you can, for example, make this folder the default file save locations for frequently used programs like Word or Excel. In fact I recommend doing so.
The Dropbox software constantly runs in the background, and whenever a change is made to any file in the folder, it replicates the change to a copy of the folder that is kept online, at its own servers.
That takes care of back-up. The other Dropbox service, file syncing, occurs when you install Dropbox on a second (or third or fourth or fifth) computer. Whenever you turn that new computer on, Dropbox gets to work making sure its My Dropbox folder is identical to all the others. The upshot is that you can be working on a memo at the office, leave for home, and then be able to pick up at the same point in the memo on your home PC without ever having to worry about moving the file yourself.
And in contrast to approaches like Google Docs, you won't have to switch your applications to gain this file mobility. Many of us are perfectly happy using Microsoft Office and are anxious to gain the benefits of "cloud computing" without having to switch away from the programs we have spent so many years with in the salt mines.
There are two other notable uses for Dropbox. Your files also are always available online, via the main Dropbox servers, in case you are working on a machine on which the software has not been installed. That online version also allows you, in many cases, to revert to earlier versions of a file, in case you want to see what something looked like several revisions ago.
A second added attraction is that Dropbox makes it easy to send to someone else very large files, the sort that usually choke e-mail systems. To do so, simply copy the file into the special "Public" sub-folder that you'll see in your Dropbox folder. Then when you right-click on the file name, Dropbox generates a URL for it, which you can e-mail to the person with whom you are sharing. The person sharing the file, in turn, simply clicks on the URL and an FTP-style download begins right away, completely circumventing pokey old e-mail servers.
All this is free, for now, as long as your Dropbox folder holds less than two gigabytes of data. You can upgrade and store up to 50 gigabytes for $10, or 100 gigabytes for $20.
While I have no doubt the folks at Dropbox take security and reliability extremely seriously, you probably don't want to store the most sensitive sorts of corporate information this way: health records, credit card numbers and the like. But for workaday files, it, as the kids say, is sweet! And it costs nothing to try.
To read more of Lee Gomes' stories, click here. Contact the writer at lgomes@forbes.com.
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