I've been using dropbox for a few years now, back when it was just a beta. I really liked it then because it integrated so well in to my mac environment. Since then, it has continued to remain stable and I've learnt a lot more about it. For instance, it uses Amazon S3 behind the scenes. There's no point me keeping an S3 account if I'm using dropbox. Dropbox gives you the first 2gb free - from there you have to pay for it, however they'll also offer you an unlimited backup for every file change you make too.

This blog post is not an advertisement for dropbox - but I thought people might be interested in how I work with it. I have dropbox installed on my work macbook pro, my personal macbook air and my personal gaming machine running Windows7. I also have dropbox on my iPhone. It synchronizes the files between all the devices (the iPhone version uses the web interface on their servers). When the devices are on the same LAN, it'll copy the files over the lan instead of syncing via their servers.

In this way, I can keep all four devices in sync - but it got a little better yesterday when I discovered that 1password, the program I use to securely manage my passwords was designed in such a way that it updates "bits" of the password file deliberately so that syncing is fast. So I've moved my 1password repository in to my dropbox and now I can access it from all of my mac computers too.

The finally happy tick came this evening when I pondered how I could move my encrypted files on to the dropbox too. I have a few encrypted .dmg files that are of fixed size - 1gb files. I realized that I could shrink them by using a sparse file instead of a fixed file and still keep it encrypted. But as I went to set this up, I noticed something new to me - sparse bundles. These work similar to a sparse file but it keeps the files in "bands" that get updated incrementally much like what 1password is doing. This means that I can keep my encrypted files in the dropbox as an encrypted sparse bundle and only the changes I make will need to be transmitted over the network.

I couldn't be happier - now I have offsite backup, multiple computer synchronization and all of my important information (passwords, etc) can be kept securely between (as secure as I need it to be).

I was so happy with it all, I actually bumped up past the 2gb limit and decided to fork over some cash to the company. I rarely spend money on software, but I recommend dropbox to anyone who is interested in this sort of capability - after all, the first 2gb is free!