“You have been there. You are about to buy lunch and you realize that your wallet is in your other pants.” It is true, I have been there. Many times. In fact, not only am I often searching for my wallet or my keys, I also have problems remembering where I have the most updated version of my electronic files, documents, spreadsheets, etc.
The above quote is the opening sentence of a video from Dropbox. Dropbox, a storage provider released in September 2008, might be the solution for everyone who – like me – tends to lose track of stuff. It is hard to imagine, at this point, after having used it for three weeks, how I could have survived without it.
But let me first explain what my initial problem was. I often work at different places, using my office desktop, my home desktop, or my laptop. Sometimes I go home and want to finish what I was working on, or I receive an email from an angry student, who wants to know how I could have given a C for the final report. I used to have my data on the network drive of the school and could access it in that way from my home desktop or laptop. However, the system I used (Netdrive) was not compatible with Windows Vista, so I had to look for a different solution. For some weeks, I have kept my data on a USB flash drive. Of course, this was asking for problems; after forgetting my flash drive several times, and once thinking I actually lost it (with no backup), I gave up on this potential solution.
A colleague advised me to try out Windows Live Sync, a file synchronization application, or Carbonite, an online backup service, but I didn’t get either to run well. Finally, things got better when I got the word that Dropbox was the answer to my problem.
It starts with a very nice, simple website (www.dropbox.com). This is a website layout as I would like my desk to look like: calm and orderly. Then there is an explanation video, again simple and concise. Downloading and installing literally took me 5 minutes.
What does it do? You designate a folder on your hard drive by calling it “dropbox” and the server silently creates a backup of the folder on their drives, which may take some time, depending on the folder size and your connection. Then you create dropbox folders on your other laptop, desktop, or PDA, and the service will create identical copies of the original folder. I now have all my work data in the dropbox folder, so I can access, modify, create, or delete files on any location, while it feels as if there is only one database. In fact, if you are traveling and your laptop brakes down, you can still access all your data via a web interface. Finally, the best part… this is all for free! You are wondering, where is the catch? Well, the catch is that this is so convenient that you will want to use more than the 3 GB that Dropbox offers for free, so you may end up paying $10 per month for 50 GB or $20 for 100 GB of storage.
In my opinion, this is not just a convenient idea that will come and go, replaced by something better. This is a step on a one-way road with no return. Do you remember the small data cassettes and floppy disks we used to use? Or the punch cards and punch tapes we used just some years before that? I still see colleagues walking around with CDs or DVDs, not realizing that is so passé… The idea that data storage is something you can touch will fade away within a few years. It is just as when I speak with my 10-year old son and try to explain him what the internet looked like before Google… a difficult concept to grasp for somebody who has never experienced it.
The bigger picture in my mind is that this is just one small development towards computers and data becoming more ubiquitous in our lives. In my work as academic, in one week I may need to teach in Madrid, attend a conference in the US, or visit friends in Holland while needing to keep in touch with my students. I foresee a future in which computers become a commodity as our data, software, and personal preferences are stored on the web. Of course, this is not a new idea. But when you use a service such as Dropbox for the first time, you come to realize how fast this development is going and how irreversible it is. Enough for today. Let me save this document … in my Dropbox folder of course!
The author of this blog, Govert Vroom, is an Assistant Professor at the Strategic Management Department of IESE Business School Barcelona. He is by no means an expert in IT or affiliated with Dropbox Inc. There are many other online storage providers, see for more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_hosting_service.
Microsoft (no affiliation here) has another product, Live Mesh, that in addition to syncronizing your files a la Dropbox gives you remote access to your other computers (provided, of course, that you leave them on). This is particularly useful when you realize that you forgot to add one document to your synchronized, Live Mesh files. Live Mesh offers 5GB for free but there is NO possibility of extending the storage space by paying a fee.