After hearing so much about Dropbox and since my external HDD was on loan with a friend, I decided to give it a try. The client is available for PC, Mac and Linux, extremely useful since I do not work on just a Mac alone.

As of 11 September 2008, it was available to the public but I believe it is still running on beta as I have not read anything on a stable release yet. A default space of 2GB is given out free. If you want more, you can upgrade to a 50GB package for USD $9.99 per month or USD $99 per year.

Once you are logged into your account on the client, all that needs doing is to drop your files into the Dropbox folder and depending on the size, it could take a while before you can see it listed on the web interface.

Every time you login to your account, Dropbox will attempt to synchronize whatever files are on your web interface with your local Dropbox folder. You will never have to worry about previously uploaded files from another computer gone missing.

Remaining space left in your Dropbox account

You do not need to do anything except patiently wait for Dropbox to synchronize the files, and you can start working on them. I really like how easy is it to find out how much remaining storage space is left in my account; a simple click on the Dropbox icon.

Your recent activity is tracked and listed on the web interface. Apart from knowing what you recently did, it also helps to check if any unauthorized user is tampering with your account.

The photo gallery and shared folders are extremely handy tools during post travel periods where everybody would be asking for photos and videos taken during the trip. I have yet to give these two features a test run though.

Dropbox was meant as an alternative to my external HDD, but I found working with it easier and simpler. There was no need to plug in a device just to get access to my files, once the synchronization was done, I could readily access it.

For now, it is my preferred online storage solution. Is it yours? If not, what are you using?