How to use the Dropbox Cloud Service
Dropbox is an incredibly useful tool that I have used in many of my businesses.
There are 3 major uses of it that I discuss in the video below.
- Acts as an online backup for important files that you may have
- Allows you to easily share files / folders with colleagues, friends and family.
- Allows you to create download links for files that are too big to email.
How Dropbox Works
Dropbox is a software service (which has a good free version) that creates a folder on your computer (called the Dropbox folder) which is automatically backed up to the cloud.
In other words, every file that you copy in to your Dropbox folder on your computer is also stored online at dropbox.com.
That means that even if you don’t have your computer with you (e.g. if it gets stolen) then everything in your Dropbox folder can still be accessed. You can do so from any other computer which has internet access by going to dropbox.com and logging into your Dropbox account.
Anything you put into Dropbox is automatically private. However, you can create sub-folders in your Dropbox folder which you can then share with others. Whatever they copy into that folder will automatically download on to your computer and vice-versa.
Finally, if you have a file that is too big to email (e.g. say it is 20MB large) then Dropbox offers a convenient way to create a download link.