Topic: Anything like dropbox?

[ober]

Do any of you guys use anything similar to Dropbox (www.dropbox.com)?  My wife has a group of people (www.nrgreenfest.org) that need to share files during the planning phase of their event.  I really like the simplicity of Dropbox and it seems to be one of the few apps like that which will allow you to share with more than 2 computers.  It also integrates so nicely and there is no learning curve.

I saw one tutorial on how to use multiple dropboxes on one PC (my wife would run our personal one and one for the group on her laptop), but it was untested and I haven't tried it yet.  So in the case where I can't get that to work, I'm going to need another option for them.  Any suggestions?

And please don't suggest SugarSync or FolderShare.  I've already taken them out of the running.

[ober]

Hmm... did a little more digging and found a tested, solid way to do it with Dropbox.  Would still like to hear what everyone is using.

[Mike]

Google docs.

[hans]

Sadly, we're still on foldershare. A while back I tried out something cammed poerfolder I think. it was a java based version like foldeshare but you could find the community version on sourceforge.

We're talking about moving most of our stuff to Google docs now, which I'm game for since I'm working on a Linux dev machine now.

[ober]

Google docs.

But what if they already have 100's of documents that they just want to put in a central location?  I thought Google Docs was just the ability to create and edit documents that didn't already exist.  I haven't used it enough to know, to be honest.

[Mike]

Nope, you can upload existing files

[jkim]

Up to 1gb/file limited to your total google space.

[hans]

Google Docs recently allowed all sorts of filetypes now. Although, I don't know how that would work with doc type files if they would get altered at all, but pdfs and zips and stuff should work fine.

[Perspective]

Simple docs are usually fine but if you have lots of formatting it gets messed up in google docs.

[ober]

And that's the other thing... I want something more simple... loaded on their local setups.  I don't want them to have to upload and download a bunch of shit.  Trust me... these aren't the most tech-savvy group of people.  So it looks like Dropbox is the way to go.

[webwhy]

i think dropbox is a great application.  it's tough to beat.

[ober]

That's what my research has found too.

[kermi3]

At my suggestion, we use dropbox in our research - lets us coordinate various drafts etc together - we probably have at least 20-30 documents on there.  Only drawbacks are the total 2 Gb limit and that it has to be in the dropbox folder (but there are work arounds for that).  We've got 3 grad students and the older comp illiterate professor on there.  We have no trouble with it at all, we just have to be careful that only one of us is editing something at a time.

Review rating: 9/10

[kermi3]

Don't know what you've setup obes,, but I just saw this and thought of you...

http://lifehacker.com/5503770/five-best-online-file-sharing-services

[micah]

does anyone know of any dropbox-like software that can be used with your own server space?

I'm paying quite a bit for my web hosting but only using like 5% of my storage space. I've thought about backing up a lot of files to that space, since I'm paying for it, but its a pain to constantly have to manually FTP files. It would be nice to have something like dropbox that lets you sync across devices and maintain version control but that lets me connect it to the server space I already am paying for (instead of paying for yet another online service)

any suggestions?