10 Ways To Use Dropbox Effectively
Earlier cloud computing was limited to large corporations but thanks to software like Dropbox, everyone can have a piece of the pie. Dropbox brings to your home, the ability to store your data in the cloud and be able to access it from anywhere.
But did you know that Dropbox is capable of more than just simple data storage? Here are some tips on how to use Dropbox more effectively.
A shared folder for teams
One of the coolest ways you can make the most out of Dropbox is by making it a folder or drive for your team. This is especially useful if you are a part of team whose members are scattered across the globe.
Any document uploaded by the team can be accessed by others who can then proceed to download and edit it and then re-sync it with the Dropbox shared folder.
This helps you in getting the latest and updated documents at a touch. Moreover, you do not need to worry about deleting important files and folders or making a bad edit because the original files are always available on the Dropbox account.
My Documents or My Dropbox
This is for the people who use Microsoft Windows as their operating system. Now, there is a very deceptively simple way you can automatically set the files in My Documents to sync with Dropbox.
You can do that simply by changing the default location of My Documents to your Dropbox folder. What? Didn’t you know that you could change the location? Well, now you do.
Give vent to your creativity
It is quite easy to create files on Dropbox which are publicly shared and these files can be accessed through a URL. Now let us shift to browsers. Most browsers have very limited options in the way of the home page customization. This is more often noticed in mobile devices.
If you know a bit about HTML programming, then you can create a start page which suits your needs and tastes and save it as a HTML file on your Dropbox public folder. Then simply get the URL of that file and enjoy the new look of your browser.
Start Torrents whenever you want
After reading that line, you must be wondering how to use Dropbox as a torrent downloader?After all didn’t you ever wish if there was some way your torrents could be started while you leave the office so that you could access the finished download as soon as you reached home?
Well, looks like your prayer has finally been answered because, Dropbox allows you to do exactly that. Most torrent clients allow you to monitor a folder on your PC for getting torrent files. Simply select a Dropbox folder as the default.
Now you can add the torrent files to that folder and let your torrent client do the rest. Most torrent clients including uTorrent support this feature nowadays.
A portable music library
You already know enough about using Dropbox as a storage space for all the music you love to listen to. Dropbox itself allows you to listen to the songs in your folder but you have to listen to them one by one. That is why Dropbox has launched an app which is more or less a media player for the music files in your Dropbox folders.
DropTunes is a cloud streaming player designed specifically for Dropbox. The app is available in iOS only at the moment but Android and other smartphone users can access the player through the DropTunes website.
Camera upload
One of the niftiest features available in the mobile app of Dropbox has to be the camera upload ability. Turning on this feature in your app will let Dropbox automatically sync the pictures you have taken with the camera to a folder in Dropbox.
Now, you need not go through the hassle of selecting files for upload again and again. This also means that, you can easily get your photos in your PC by simply syncing Dropbox.
Sharing is caring
In Dropbox, sharing multiple types of files is very easy. We have already seen how we can share documents to make our work easier but now let us see how it can make our social life simpler. You can use the share option in Dropbox to share photos and videos to Facebook and Twitter directly.
Depending on the type of file, you will get other methods of sharing like text messages. Of course only the link of the file will be shared but that is quite enough for almost all files we like to share.
Always at your fingertips
There are a number of files which we require but rarely and thanks to the limited space on mobile phones we cannot keep them there. Thanks to Dropbox, such files are never far way.
For example, instead of storing your eBook collection on your phone, save it in Dropbox. After all, you are not going to read all those books at the same time, are you?
App support
More and more third party apps are giving their customers Dropbox support in their apps. This can be very helpful. Instead of storing data on ten different apps, you can simply use Dropbox. This helps when you need to access the data on those apps without the hassle of opening them one by one.
Organization and customization
Dropbox sure has a lot of neat features, but they are meaningless, if you do not organize the files efficiently. Dropbox allows you to create folders and sub-folders so make use of this. Dropbox can only be good if you can keep it free from clutter.
How do you use Dropbox?
These are some of the many ways on how to use Dropbox in a more effective manner. Dropbox is one of the best apps for cloud storage and it has some additional features which make it a very notable piece of software.
Dropbox also gives you the option of upgrading your account to a larger storage space for a small fee. If you have any more ideas on how to use Dropbox more effectively and efficiently, share them with us.
