Every time I’m tempted to write about some tech product that’s been around awhile, I’m torn. On one hand, I’ll be blasted by the technogeeks for being late to the party. On the other hand, it doesn’t seem right to keep something great hidden under a barrel from the rest of the world.
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So here goes: I love Dropbox.
I just finished writing a 900-page book. Not just writing –- “packaging,” which means I’m also responsible for doing, or hiring people to do, the editing, the technical review, the page layout, the index and so on. Over the last 12 years, I’ve produced about 35 books this way.
Logistically, it’s a screaming nightmare. Each chapter has to worm its way through a series of stages. For example, on this book, each chapter I wrote went first to Julie, the copy editor; then Kirill, the technical editor; back to me, to incorporate their edits; then to Phil, the designer; back to Julie, who distributed them to a team of proofreaders; back to me for a final check; then back to Phil for conversion to high-resolution PDF files for turning in to the printing plant.
If you can believe it, for 12 years, we’ve passed these files around by e-mail — except for the files that were too big for e-mail. Those, we had to turn into .zip files, post them to an FTP server, notify the recipient by e-mail; the recipient had to download them, unzip them, and throw away the .zip file. It was a technical, multi-step hassle.
Inevitably, we’d wind up with occasional visits to Version Hell, where we’d lose track of who had the “hot potato.” We’d wind up with two people editing the same chapter in different ways.
On this book, everything was different. We used Dropbox.
It’s a free service that puts a magic folder on your computer desktop. Anything you put into it magically appears in an identical folder on all your other computers.
That simple concept offers a wealth of possibilities. You can work on a project at the office, then go home and pick right up from where you left off. Those same files are in the same Dropbox folder — without ever having to send them, carry them or transfer them.
You can also consider Dropbox a simple, automatic backup system. After all, anything that sits on multiple computers simultaneously is, by definition, backed up. (You get 2 gigabytes of storage at no charge. Each time you refer a friend to Dropbox, you get upgraded by .25 gigabytes, up to 8 gigabytes. Or you can pay a monthly fee for much greater storage.)
There are even iPhone and Android apps, so that you can open common kinds of files (like photos, videos, Office and PDF documents) right on the phone, and forward them to other people. Yes, even though the files themselves are at home on your computer.
Over the years, I’ve heard so many rave reviews of Dropbox that I decided to see if it could relieve my bookflow headache. Turns out you can grant other people access to certain folders in your Dropbox folder.
So I set up a folder called “First Drafts.” When I finished a chapter on my Mac laptop, I dropped the Word file in there. On Julie’s Windows machine in Montana, a tiny notification window appeared that said, “A new file has arrived in ‘First Drafts’”—and there it was, ready for her to open and edit. No file transfer, no e-mail, no FTP, no stuffing or zipping, no effort whatsoever on her part or mine. It was a miracle.
After editing, she’d add her initials to the file’s name; its name changed in my First Drafts folder, too, so I knew she was finished with it. Again, nobody had to send or transfer anything; it’s exactly as though the file was in two places at once.
The illustrations for these books are too big for e-mail and a royal pain to zip up and send by FTP. But we didn’t care. I dragged each chapter full of pictures into the “Graphics” folder, and they appeared by magic on Phil’s desktop in Stamford, Conn., and Kirill’s desktop in Moscow.
Even though my Dropbox folder appeared to be physically in multiple places simultaneously, my gut told me that behind the scenes, Dropbox must work by rapidly uploading and downloading files and carefully synchronizing the changes. Once, when I was about to leave my home Wi-Fi network, I wished I knew if it had finished syncing my recently added files; I didn’t want to run for the plane without ensuring that my collaborators had the files. So I clicked the little Dropbox icon on my menu bar. And there it was, right where I hoped to see it: “All files synced.” Bingo!
There are other, rival services. SugarSync, for example, is like Dropbox Plus — it offers many more features, at the cost of complexity. (Typical example: In SugarSync, you can set up multiple synchronized folders. In Dropbox, only one master folder is synced, although you can create as many folders inside it as you like.)
But me, I’m another Dropbox convert. Julie, Kirill and Phil were all equally astonished at how easily and effortlessly the system worked. Nobody lost a file, nobody fell into Version Hell, and everybody was spared the psychological wincing of realizing, “Ugh — now I have to figure out how to get this to the next person.”
I realize that not everybody works on such elaborate file-shuttling projects. But try Dropbox for its ability to keep your important files everywhere at once. Or try it as an automatic, silent, encrypted backup of your essentials. Or try it so that you can get at your computer’s files from your phone.
The main thing, though, is to try it. There are so few free, delightful, polished gems like this.