How To Dropbox – Access Your Photos, Videos and Docs Anywhere

In today’s world just about everything is in the cloud. What does that mean? Well basically it means that everything you do on your computer is really no longer being stored just on your computer. It’s being stored on the internet.  Sharing your content across all your devices has become a normal thing to most of us.  I have noticed more and more however that there are still many of you out there that do not take advantage of all the great and “free” services out there that could possibly make your life easier.  To begin I will tell you that you do not need to feel overwhelmed when it comes to these types of services. Most of them offer free service and just about all of them are absolutely simplified to make your life easier.

As I just stated there are many different companies and places that offer pretty much the same services. The one that I have found to be the easiest and best in my opinion is none other than Dropbox.

What is Dropbox?

Dropbox is a free service that allows you to store and share your content across all of your devices.  I began using it years ago because my family is spread across three different states and we would always have hundreds of photographs after spending a holiday or a weekend together. It got ridiculously tough to get everyone a copy of each photo after we all had made it back home. E mail attachments were great for five or six photos; but when each one of us had 100’s of photos; email just wasn’t cutting it.  Dropbox allowed each of us to have a Shared folder where we could just simple “drop” the photos in the folder and done.  It was that simple.  Drag, and drop and now anyone that has access to that folder can view and have those photos for their own.  Yes there are many different photo sharing sites that allow you to do this and manage your photos.  Most of them however insist on all the people that you are trying to share your photos with sign up with an account to whichever service you are using.  With Dropbox that doesn’t matter. You can even send files to people that do not have a Dropbox account and they will be able to download whatever file you send them straight to their device.

Getting Started and Set Up:

Getting started with Dropbox is simple. Just go to dropbox.com and create an account. Once you do that you will download and install Dropbox to your computer.  Once Dropbox is downloaded to your computer it will ask you where you would like to store your Dropbox folder.  This folder is where all your Dropbox content will live.  Whatever you do in this folder will be done on any other device that you have Dropbox installed as well as when you log in to your Dropbox via a web browser.  So for example. If you create a new folder inside your Dropbox folder called, “test” (or whatever you want to call it); then you would see that same folder on all your other devices.  If you delete the folder “test”, then it will be deleted from all the other places that you have Dropbox installed. So a good example of how this works would be if you have a work computer and a home computer. It’s the end of the day and you need to take some of that work home. So you quickly throw all those files into a folder that is inside your work computer’s Dropbox folder.  Done.  When you get home. You get on your home computer and there are your files right there in your Dropbox Folder on your home computer.

Dropbox offers you 2GB of free storage that can be upgraded if you choose to pay for it.

Sharing with Dropbox:

Sharing with Dropbox is simple too.  There are a few different ways to share.  You can start by logging in to your Dropbox. Just go to the Dropbox website and sign in.  If you click the Sharing link that has the rainbow next to it then you will be taken to a window that allows you to manage and create all your shared folders.  One thing to keep in mind is that whoever can access your shared folders will have full access rights to your content in that folder. What that means is that if you share a folder with your friends and they accidentally delete something in there; then it’s gone from your end of it as well.  This is why you should always have more than one copy of your valuable content.

It’s Just That Easy:

Dropbox is in my opinion the most simple solution for both sharing and syncing your content across multiple computers and devices. It works on all platforms and is free.  It also has a great help and support section on their main website that makes learning more about Dropbox very simple.  Give it a try today!  You can even invite new friends to join Dropbox and you will be get rewarded for each friend you sign up with extra storage. You can connect your Facebook and Twitter as well for some bonus rewards too.

Final Thought:

As I stated before there are many different websites and services that offer this type of thing.  In my opinion Dropbox are some of the pioneers of this technology and they are still one of the leading competitors in cloud storage and syncing.  They continue to improve their service and features without making things seem bloated and complicated. Everything just works and it’s really super simple to do. So what are you waiting for?  Just go to

http://www.dropbox.com and get started!