Remember “SneakerNet?”  Where you would literally walk from computer to computer, carrying a floppy disk, Zip Drive, or some other outdated thing with your files on it?  I can’t say that those things have totally gone away (USB thumb drives have replaced floppies, but people still carry them around).  I can say, however – there’s a better way.

DropBox was started recently by a devoted team of coders, and they were one of the first services to offer universal cloud-based storage.  What does this mean?

It means that they run a data center with lots of hard drives, and when you sign up, you get a small slice of that storage.  Then you can copy files to that space and have those files available to you anywhere you have an internet connection.  What’s “magic” about it is that whenever you update a file in your DropBox, every other device you have connected to it updates the file immediately.  Plus, you can access your stuff from any Android phone, iPhone, PC, Mac, or anything with a web browser.

What’s more, it has a rich developer community that has written amazing addons to DropBox (a complete catalog is here).  You can share a specific folder with others, or have a public folder with download links to any file.  You can email files to an email adddress which will add the email’s attachments to your DropBox.  It even supports syncing of photos and video like Apple’s iCloud.  There are whole websites that automate the processing of files that appear in DropBox folders (read about one example, Wappwolf, here).

I recommend it to small companies who need a shared “file server” but don’t want to set up hardware for it.  Give it a try by clicking here, it’s free!