Anyone use this? Ive just joined and im really impressed with it.3gb for free aint bad and has an iphone app too!

https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTkyMzYxNzg5

Not bad!

Love the pictures on the website tour though.

I use it all the time and I have to say, it's brilliant!

I have been using this a while now and was rather impressed.

It's great for uni work when working in teams/groups. (Just make sure people don't work on the same file at any one given time! It does lead to problems!)

These things have their uses but you do have to beware if your data has real value.

BY UTILIZING THE SITE, CONTENT, FILES AND/OR SERVICES, YOU CONSENT TO ALLOW DROPBOX TO ACCESS YOUR COMPUTER TO ACCESS ANY FILES THAT ARE PLACED IN THE 'MY DROPBOX,' 'DROPBOX' FOLDERS, AND/OR ANY OTHER FOLDER WHICH YOU CHOOSE TO LINK TO DROPBOX

I'd consider encrypting the data in a TrueCrypt container then uploading the container to Dropbox.

Gets even worse if you want to use it for work.

It's available for Android as well, been using it for a while without any problems so far

I use it as a quick method of transferring photos from pie phone to pie pad. Works pretty well tbh

Do you want your own Dropbox?

Use this;

http://db.tt/dNqpoQQ

I'm undecided on DropBox - I think apple's Cloud might be better suited to me.

Sorry to spoil the Dropbox luv-in boys, but Microsofts Skydrive (Free and available if you have a Windows Live identity) offers 25 gigs of space, not the miserly 2 gigs offered by DB, its free and its has enhanced compatibility with existing Microsoft packages.

Nick

Dropbox still offers things that Skydrive doesn't though.

1) a desktop app (Windows Live Mesh used to offer access to a separate storage facility but it wasn't Skydrive)

2) cross-platform ability, Windows Live Mesh was Windows only. Arguably the SkyDrive website is "cross platform" but then that's not automated backup/sync so I wouldn't consider it an alternative to a proper desktop app. Dropbox supports Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iPhone.

3) Sharing across accounts so you can have your account with your personal stuff in it, and then share out a single folder. Makes it a good alternative for "small team" use IMO

4) no filesize limits, SkyDrive is limited to 100MB/file. I have plenty of things which are bigger than that that I might want to back up and although SkyDrive has 25GB in total it would be useless for me

Errr - Can't MS One Note fulfill the desktop app and sharing role ?

Nick

Edited 24 September, 201114 yr by Clunkclick

Not that I know of? That's just an online notebook which allows you to embed data into OneNote notebooks. Doesn't do syncing, and doesn't allow storage of arbitrary data in an easy to use format. I.e. you can embed pictures into a note, but you then need OneNote to see them on any other computer you want to use (so several Office licenses to get to your data, assuming you can get it synced in the first place). Dropbox and the like just store the file, upload a picture to Dropbox and you download it as a picture, doesn't need a viewer or any expensive software.

edit - seems that OneNote does allow some kind of web storage, but it's disabled by our IT policies at work. So it may fulfill syncing, but you would still have to embed your content into a OneNote notebook which comes with two major advantages:

1) it probably doesn't support just a stream of bits, but has to embed a known format (fine for common stuff like JPG images, MP3 audio, etc, but what do you do if you want to upload something more interesting such as an Atari ST disk image that OneNote doesn't cater for?)

2) it still locks you into using OneNote to get your content out again, which again isn't cross-platform

So again, it's not really an alternative to Dropbox IMO.

Edited 24 September, 201114 yr by gavinchappell

I've just invested in MS Office 2010 and I am in the process of finding out what everything does.

From what I understand One Note syncs with everything its connected to e.g. lappies, mobile phones other desktops. It supports streaming to the extent that you can embed audio and video files in it and play them back in ON.

I think it has its own reserved section within the Skydrive server that enables it to do all these functions.

What's more Skydrive seems to duplicate this capability. With Skydrive the account holder can even nominate what machines to sync with.

You can load files up to and down from Skydrive using any application (Not just Microsoft apps). All you need to do this is a Windows Live identity (A one minute job open an account). Basically, as long as your operating system supports a HTML based browser you're OK. As regards formats I just saved and retrieved several *.dat files from a portable electro cardiogram recorder without incident. Reference your point regarding disk images aren't these saved in *.ISO files ? If not couldn't they be embedded in an archive type file such as *rar ?

Once files are on Skydrive the account holder and, if required, nominated bods can access these files and perform any operations on them (Given account holder permissions) using any proprietry software. You can even manipulate the files using a Microsoft Office suite that's embedded in the Skydrive software - so you don't need to invest in MS Office.

Also, I'm thinking that maybe Sharepoint services can be used to propagate things like video streaming.

Nick

Edited 24 September, 201114 yr by Clunkclick

I specifically mentioned the Atari as last night I'd just busted out my Atari ST emulator and ancient copy of Moonwalker. So no, not all disk images are in ISO, these are in some custom ST format I believe. Probably could embed them into a zip/rar file, but that then makes them more complicated to open. As I said, HTML5 does add an element of cross platform ability, but to get all the features of SkyDrive I believe you need Silverlight as well which is Windows only as far as I know. And then there's the 100MB filesize limit (on my online backup account, I've got a handful of 13GB files which are basically 60 minutes video recordings from my old miniDV camcorder. I'm not splitting them up into 130 100MB chunks!).

OneNote itself is a fine enough app for what it does, but I think trying to shoehorn it into doing Dropbox-alike things is just silly, it's not designed for it and eventually you'll come up against something it just won't do. For note-taking it's probably excellent though (I don't use it myself, I tend to use Google Docs as I can also see any snippets of text from there on my phone, should I need to). And SkyDrive is probably a fine service too, but the fact is that a lot of other alternatives are a lot more feature-rich even though they may offer less storage.

As you say, video file size is, at the moment the determining factor.

Nick