Dropbox

Sometime ago I recommended Foldershare as part of this series. The reason I recommended this was that it made keeping the document folders on two computers in sync over the net pretty simple, which made my life as an academic much easier.


Since that time Microsoft have effectively withdrawn that product and replaced it with one which at least for me seems to crash on a regular basis. And while Foldershare was handy it lacks two important features.

The first is that foldershare required both computers to be on to make any transfers, so it only worked if you had your computer at home and at work on at the same time, not entirely environmentally friendly!

The second is that foldershare copied the whole changed file rather than just the changes, so with large files this could take a long time.

I've now switched to a program called Dropbox

Dropbox stores a copy of your documents in the "cloud" so it doesn't require both computers to be on, and it updates file incrementally rather than in entire file blocks.

To install the program go here: Dropbox

And download it. Once you have installed it, make a new folder in your Dropbox and copy any files you want to keep in sync (you get 2 GB's free which should be enough for any ones documents) into that folder. Then install Dropbox onto your other computers and voila, you have copies of the latest version of your documents wherever you go.