Dropbox

In the spirit of promoting those products that really make a difference in your work life, let me give a loud shout-out to Dropbox. I’m a road warrior, kinda, in that I migrate between my home office and a bunch of coffee shops, so I’m always mixing my work environment between my laptop and desktop workstation. Some things I work on, like source code in SVN already naturally has a model of disconnected work with a synchronization step. But other things (things I’m doing right now), like talks and presentations, workshops, general writing do not. How to get the benefit of disconnected editing with connected synchronization?

Enter Dropbox! Dropbox sets of a folder on each machine you install it on, and you attach that folder to your Dropbox account. Anything you save in that folder gets replicated up to an “in the cloud” copy regularly while you’re internet connected. And when you’re not, it’s just like any other local copy. You can also share Dropbox folders with others, which is really handy for collaborating on things like PPTs. No more shipping around the latest copy of that Word document.

Functionally, it’s nothing that hasn’t been done before, but it’s been done really well, it’s part of my work-life now, and for small folders (<1Gb) it’s free. For anyone who works on more than one machine regularly and with disconnection, it’s a real time-saver.