I’m just a kid in the middle of all this…

I wanted to take a moment to praise a new desktop product that has really changed the way I work. Dropbox is a desktop application that interfaces with an online storage service of the same name. It enables you to have a folder on your machine that is constantly in sync with the copy online, and any other machines you have the software installed on. I stumbled on a really useful way of using the service. I created a ‘web’ folder inside the Dropbox folder and moved all my website projects into that. I then opened up MAMP which I use to run a local copy of Apache and mySQL and told it to use this new folder as its default web root. I did the same on my work machine and my laptop. Dropbox syncs the files and folders, which means I can be confident that whatever machine I sit down at to work, I always have the latest versions of all the files ready and running locally. Great!

On top of that, by digging a little deeper you’ll find that the Dropbox web interface gives you extensive versioning information on all your data, letting you restore deleted files and roll back to previous versions. I recently deleted an entire folder of work, which after a few minutes of panicking I realised Dropbox could restore for me at the click of a button. For someone that can’t be bothered to get to grips with a full Subversion system this is a fantastic alternative. Currently the beta service allows you 5GB of storage. I thoroughly recommend it.