Thorough Review of DropBox Online Storage Solution

Company background
Dropbox has been around for a couple of years and they have done excellent things in that small amount of time. I particularly like their VoteBox idea that lets you to choose which features they work on first. There are three editions: 1 free and 2 premium or pro version. The free edition allocates 2 Gb whilst the pro versions give you with 50 or 100 Gb. Backup and synchronizing are straightforward to get going and work continually behind the scenes so it is a real “set it and forget it” system. The company also offer limitless file versioning as an option to the Premium editions.

PDA 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 currenty supported. And how is this for customer facing: If you follow their ‘getting started guide’ and complete most of the steps you are rewarded with an additional 250Mb of storage! Brilliant! If you need even more capacity, then invite friends and you get another 250Mb per referral up to a limit of 8Gb.

Dropbox was founded by Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi back in 2007, and received seed funding from Y Combinator. As of now, Dropbox is well-funded by Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners, and Amidzad. After launching publicly in September of 2008, they have attracted over 3,000,000 users and are growing rapidly. They have been featured in magazines and on high profile technical websites, and have won awards from PC Magazine and CNET. Their passion is making a service that really delivers and putting it in millions of people's hands.

Security Options
DropBox has average security: The web site is SSL encrypted with a requirement for a username and password to get to your files. Files in transit are protected with SSL encryption and when on their servers, your data is encrypted with 256 AES encryption. In addition to this, their service runs on the Amazon AWS service which is supported by the Amazon name and quality stamp.

Backup Abilities
Continuous and ‘Block Level’ backups are utilized to guarantee your files are regularly protected. In-use files are backed up continually by using 'Block level Incremental Backups' which means that DropBox only archives the sections of a file that have been edited, not the entire file.
Attaching files and folders to the DropBox archive schedule is really straightforward: Just right-click on the files you want to protect and choose 'backup with DropBox'. Alternative versions of files are kept so you can always restore an earlier edition of a file if you changed it. There is also a status indicator to display how the backup is progressing.
Unfortunately network and removable drives cannot be added to archives and commercial databases for example, exchange and SQL server are not supported directly.

File Sharing and Collaboration
Files can be shared publicly – Allowing the world to browse them – or privately where you assign 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 individuals can be allowed to make 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 option is the LAN synchronization. This allows users on the same network (home or work) to very quickly synchronize changes locally without going to the internet first. This greatly reduces your internet bandwidth load.

Customer Support
There is no telephone, online chat or direct email customer support available. There are however, many other ways to get support available: You can contact support using a web form on their site; there is an extensive knowledgebase and FAQ section; the online help is detailed to a useful level. There are also tutorials, a demo and case studies available. That said, by far the most useful resources for do-it-yourself support are the forum and blog. These are full of valuable advice and support from both the DropBox employees and customers using the service.

Conclusion
DropBox is really simple to configure and use. It provides almost all the features of a fully rounded online storage solution: Backup, Web site, multi-machine syncing, file-versioning, online photo albums and file sharing. The only feature missing is integration with online sites to let you to alter and create files directly in your DropBox. The pricing is reasonable yet there are better options available if you want more storage than 100Gb. The security is above average and the customer support is good, although the lack of phone, web chat and direct email support is a bit limiting. The forum and blog are excellent places to get your queries 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 additional Online Storage Solutions visit the author's website: savvyITsolutions.com

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