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company Details Dropbox has been around for a couple of years and they have done great things in that limited of time. Notably their VoteBox approach which allows you to pick which developments they work on next. You can choose from three options: 1 free and 2 premium or pro editions. The free version gives 2 Gb wheras the pro accounts give you with 50 or 100 Gb. Backup and synchronizing are straightforward to setup and work continually in the background so it is a actual “set it and forget it” solution. The company additionally offer limitless file versioning as an option to the Premium accounts. Mobile devices are completely supported with apps for iPhone and iTouch and a website for online enabled devices. Collaboration functions include public and private file sharing as well as commenting on files and folders. With many more features in on the way. Photo albums and video streaming are also supported. And how is this for customer facing: If you follow the ‘getting started guide’ and complete most of the steps you get an additional 250Mb of storage! Excellent! If you want even more storage, just invite friends and you get another 250Mb for each referral up to a limit of 8Gb. Dropbox was started by Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi in 2007, and got seed funding from Y Combinator. Today, Dropbox is well-funded by Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners, and Amidzad. After launching publicly in September of 2008, they have attracted in excess of three million users and are growing quickly. They have been featured in magazines and on high profile technical websites, and have won awards from places like PC Magazine and CNET. Their drive is creating a utility that rocks and putting it in millions of people's hands. Security Abilities DropBox has reasonable security: The web portal is SSL encrypted and you need a username and password to view your data. Files in transit are protected with SSL encryption and when on their servers, your files is encrypted with 256 AES encryption. In addition to this, this is managed by the Amazon AWS service which is backed by the Amazon name and quality stamp. Backup Abilities Always ready and ‘Block Level’ backups are used to guarantee your files are constantly protected. Open files are backed up continually bu utilizing 'Block level Incremental Backups' which means that DropBox only uploads the sections of a file that have been amended, instead of the whole file. Attaching files and folders to the DropBox archive schedule is very easy: Just right-click on the files you would like to to backup and select 'backup with DropBox'. Alternative versions of files are kept so you can always restore an earlier edition of a file if you accidentally changed it. There is a status indicator to display how the archive is progressing. The bad news is network and removable drives are not supported and prefessional databases like exchange and SQL server are not supported directly. File Sharing and Collaboration Information can be shared publicly – Allowing anyone to view them – or privately where you setup access rights to chosen files and folders for each user or group. Photo Albums are included and are sharable either publicly or privately. A comment can be appended to each file that is shared and viewers can be allowed to leave additional comments to create a discussion about a particular file or folder. Synchronization Synchronization is supported between different devices and between machines and the web portal. An excellent function is the LAN synchronization. This permits machines on the same network (home or work) to quickly synchronize changes locally without going to the internet first. This greatly reduces your internet bandwidth load. Customer Support There is no telephone, live chat or direct email customer support available. There are however, lots of other forms of support available: You can contact support using a web form on their site; there is an extensive knowledgebase and FAQ section; the online doc is complete to a sensible level. There are also tutorials, a demo and case studies available. That said, by far the most useful resources for self-help are the forum and blog. These are full of handy advice and support from both the DropBox employees and individuals using the service. Conclusion DropBox is extremely straightforward to configure and use. It offers almost all the features of a fully rounded online storage solution: Backup, Web portal, multiple device synchronization, file-versioning, online photo albums and file sharing. The only functionality not present is integration with online sites to permit you to amend and create files directly in your DropBox. The pricing is not bad although there are better offers available if you want more storage than 100Gb. The security is above average and the customer support is good, although the lack of phone, live chat and direct email support is a bit restrictive. The forum and blog are supurb arenas to get your problems discussed. If you want an all-round online storage solution then DropBox is an excellent choice.
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For more in-depth information on DropBox and other Online Backup Solutions visit the author's website: savvyITsolutions.com
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