Ok, so you’re walking along minding your own business. Just being a pedestrian. Then out of nowhere, a massive beam of white light broke through the grey clouds above and you freakishly find yourself smack dab in the middle of this phenomenon and it’s shining on you straight from the heavens above. Then out of nowhere, $trick9 himself rolls up on you and hands you’re lucky ass his latest unreleased bag of very new dope tracks in lossless audio format. After you shit yourself and pull yourself together, it is now time to react. He has just chosen YOU to share his love with all your minions.
How would you go about passing this new bag of magic onto your followers? I suppose you could use Email. Well, each track is probably going to be roughly 4 megs. That also depends on compression and length of the song. 7+ megs a song isn’t unrealistic. Although some email servers can handle this big of filesize, there are an awful lot that can’t. Not to mention that would require possibly more than one email depending on the number of tracks. Also, do you even have everyone’s email address? You can’t afford to disgrace him by missing anyone. So now what? $trick9 has just asked you, of all people, to spread his poison and you’re already questing how to do it. If I were you, I would be scared shit-less!
What if I told you that all you had to do was put them into a folder on your desktop and sit back and let all your peeps enjoy it from there. One fell swoop of copy/paste and you’re done. Everyone you know will now have access to everything in that folder instantly (or at least as fast as your internet connections allow). You have completed the task you were given. The poison is spreading. Good job injecting the vein.
The Good News:
You don’t have to sweat it any longer. Let Dropbox do the work for you. You can now post the public link to the files in that folder on twitter, facebook, myspace, instant messengers, or any blog you see fit and everyone (including people who don’t have Dropbox) will now have access to the entire folder for their pleasure.
If you have files that you share with your friends and family or you have files that you just want to make sure you have a backup of, then you might want to give Dropbox a try. Dropbox is a file sync program that after you install it, it will put folders on your desktop. Then you drag and drop whatever files into it that you want to back up or share. Any files you put in there will automatically copy to the server. So, if you change or delete them from your folder, the changes are redone at the server as well (it does keep a version history list for your convenience). The cool part of this is that if you have a friend or family member do the same thing and you send them the link, you can invite them to join your selected folders. Now, anytime you add anything to that Dropbox folder on your desktop, not only will it sync with the server, but it will also automatically show up in the other folders of people who you share with. They don’t have to do damn thing and they will get the files. Just as well, if they add something to their folder, it will show up in your folder. Boo-ya! The only catch here is, you have to be online for this to occur. Most people who do all the sharing and such use broadband internet of some type that is always on, so this works great for them and it all happens in the background. If you use dial up, it will sync with the server each time you log on. If you have big files, this could take some time.
More Good News:
Cost is free for a 2GB account. Zero, zilch, nada. Totally free. Optionally you can spring for the $99 a year plan if you want 50GB. Using the free account, you can earn up to 3GB more space by inviting people to use it and by sharing your folders with others (250MB per invite). I am not going to get into details of how to download and install it, but if you’re interested in doing it, here is the link. When you install it, it shows a nice tutorial on how to get started, so you’re not totally left in the dust. They have add-ons like Dropbox Portable and Dropbox U3 portable so you can take it with you on a USB drive, PHP scripts for doing it from websites, and plenty of help files and tutorials available from their website. Available for Windows, Mac, Linux and coming very soon, an iPhone/iTouch app. It’s still fairly new and I might even consider it still as a beta or test run but many updates are scheduled for the future releases. Check it out.
Then Bad News:
As totally bitchin as this sounds, anything you share will be accessible by anyone you share it with. And by share, I mean full access to it. So if you add anything to the folder, everyone you share that folder with will see what you added and vice-versa. If they add to their folder, you and everyone else will be able to access it on your folder on your desktop. I know, I know, you already knew this. The pisser is if you delete something from that folder, it too will be deleted from all the folders of everyone who shares them and vice-versa. So, if you share your folder on any random website and some jackass with nothing to prove decides to log onto your folder and delete everything in that folder it will also delete everything from everyones folder as well and you will all be left in the dark (pussy deleters is what we called them back in the anonymous telnet/ftp days. You old school’ers know what I am talking about). To me, that is a major security issue and if people open their folder to find that all of their $trick9 and the Truth smack is gone, there is going to be some extremely pissed off mother fuckers and heads will roll. I don’t want to take any part of that blame, so if you do use this software, use it wisely. I do know the fine folks at Dropbox are working on this and it may be added as an updated feature in the near future. When that feature is released, you will be able to set permissions on folders and files. You will be able to make them as read-only so nobody will be able to delete anything or add anything unless you have allowed that user full control.
This is what I am waiting for before I start sharing anything to the general public. I currently use it with my family and friends that I know I can trust to contribute and not go rouge on me. I like it a lot and for what I use it for, it works absolutely fantastic! For what I want to use it for, I can’t yet due to the major feature missing of access control.
Link if you want to be referred by me and increase my box size:
https://www.getdropbox.com/referrals/NTkyMDM1MTk
Link if you don’t want to be referred by me and NOT help me increase my box size:
http://www.getdropbox.com
D-ton
Signature tagline has been laid off due to recession
