Some Great Dropbox Uses Beyond The Obvious

Some Great Dropbox Uses Beyond The Obvious

psychoboxshirt4.png (PNG Image, 1296x640 pixels) - Scaled (97%).jpgMany people know that Dropbox is great for syncing up your files between different computers.

The other day I was thinking about how in the pre-Hootsuite days I used Dropbox to sync my TweetDeck groups between machines, and I thought I’d look into some other creative uses that people have come up with.

Here are some of my favorites:

Lifehacker has two great posts about creative Dropbox uses like:

  • Putting an encrypted TrueCrypt volume on Dropbox. If you like the idea of putting things in “the cloud” but are worried about security, this is a great solution. You can have your stuff encrypted before it even goes online.
  • Using shared folders to simulate a network drive
  • Make a customized start page
  • Keep all your documents with you and accessible (even on your mobile device)
  • Keeping all your passwords synced
  • Run portable applications like Firefox and VLC

The Dropbox fan page on Facebook has a thread called “What do you use Dropbox for?” with some suggestions like:

  • Synchronize your IM (MSN, AIM, etc.) chat logs
  • Have a security camera save images to Dropbox so they can be viewed from anywhere
  • Run a website (!) out of the Dropbox folder

MaximumPC has “How to Hack Your Dropbox“, with some tips, my favorite being to catch laptop thieves using a keylogger and Dropbox.

And finally, lets hear from the source itself. Dropbox has a Tips and Tricks wiki with a bunch of ideas, including:

That should be enough to get you going. Do you have any other awesome Dropbox tips? Let us know in the comments.

About the Author

Brooks Duncan helps individuals and small businesses go paperless. He's been an accountant, a software developer, a manager in a very large corporation, and has run DocumentSnap since 2008. You can find Brooks on Twitter at @documentsnap or @brooksduncan. Thanks for stopping by.

Leave a Reply 1 comment

Sanford Alfonsi - March 17, 2012 Reply

I was a big follower too until this device lost all of my data. They have some data integrity issues they need to solve first before I would feel safe using this device again. Their support sucks since it’s always a guy by the name of Frank on the phone, the poor guy must be working 247.

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