I don't mean this to send like an advertisement, but it probably will. Funny, they probably don't need real advertising because everything I've heard has been word of mouth and has been glowing.

"Have you tried Dropbox?" "Dropbox is so awesome!" "You really need to get Dropbox!"

What's Dropbox? Go on over to the site and watch the video.

A colleague sent me an invite to Dropbox because one of the main ways that you get more free space is to have people accept your invites. And so I signed up to be collegial, but I didn't do anything with it or pay much attention to it for a few months. Mainly, I didn't want to be like my colleague and ask everyone I know to accept my invites so that I could have tons of free space.

Fortunately I didn't have any computer malfunction scares, but hearing from a couple of people who lost everything suddenly made me nervous. We have an external hard drive that's big and holds a lot of stuff, but I never remember to sync up to it. I have to get it out, plug it in, and let the sync run. I know, not that hard for piece of mind... but the piece of mind only goes back to the last sync and when you only sync every few (or six) months... not very helpful.

So I looked back at this Dropbox thing. I decided, what the hell, let's pay for the monthly upgrade. $120 a year seems like a reasonable price to be assured that all of my documents, videos, and pictures won't be destroyed should be laptop combust. As the laptop is now 4 years old, and likelihood of getting a new one from the school is uncertain, I really wanted that piece of mind. Besides, if everything is stored on the cloud, when I do eventually get a new computer, bringing over all of my important files will be no problem.

My files are still stored locally on my laptop (whose hard drive is nearly full... eek!). I don't have to have an internet connection to get my files on my laptop. But what I love about Dropbox, so that Dropbox is now my "My Documents" folder. All of my work, documents, files, video clips, music, pictures, etc are saved to my Dropbox folder and are automatically synced and sent to be backed up in the cloud. If I change and resave a document, it is updated and synced automatically so long as I have an internet connection. What's even awesomer... is that I can go on any computer (or internet capable device... I have an app on my phone) and go to Dropbox.com and login and get to all of my files. If I'm at my parent's house and want to show them pictures I saved on my laptop, but my laptop is at my apartment, I can log on to Dropbox on their computer, access my pictures, and show them. In our new home office, I've been spending more time working on the desktop computer. I downloaded from Dropbox onto the desktop my old syllabi from last semester, made the changes I needed, and then uploaded them back into Dropbox. On my laptop (after a quick automatic sync), the documents are now in my Dropbox folder on my harddrive on my laptop.

So if you are like me and get nervous about the possibility of all your hard work, pictures, and other files vanishing (all of those knitting patterns you've downloaded, maybe??)... I can't recommend Dropbox enough. And hey... let me know if you want an invite.... ;)