iDisk was the most versatile component of
MobileMe, yet it doesn’t feature in iCIoud at all. As its name suggests, it’s a
freeform chunk of online storage space which appears in OS X as a disk drive,
but keeps its data in Cupertino rather than on your desk. Mounted in the Finder
sidebar, it works just like a local drive; you can drag files in or out. Often
speedier, users discovered, was to upload to it using a WebDAV client app such
as Transmit (panic.com). And when you weren’t at your own Mac, you could log in
to MobileMe and access your iDisk through a web browser. It’s very handy.
iDisk
Another feature of iDisk was that you could
set it to sync its contents with your Mac. This meant that when you were away
from an internet connection, you could still look in your Dropbox, access files
from it, and drop files back onto it. Behind the scenes, OS X was maintaining a
local copy of the iDisk’s contents, which continued to work quite happily when
disconnected from its master copy on MobileMe; next time a connection was
available, it would reconcile the local copy with the server.
A bonus of this was that if you set multiple
Macs to sync to the same iDisk, they’d each share a common set of files, so
documents you created in the office could be edited at home without you having
to email them from one machine to another.
Logging in to MobileMe through the browser
lets you view your iDisk’s content in a pseudo-Finder interface, and from
there you can share it to friends, optionally with password protection. The
public folder attached to every account allowed your friends, family and
business contacts to send files straight to your iDisk, without being able to
mess up or delete your own files.
You might think it would be tough to find
an alternative third-party tool that could replicate all of these features in
one place, but in fact there are several to choose from. Let’s have a look.
More than 50 million people use Dropbox to
synchronize files across their devices. With clients for OS X, iOS, BlackBerry,
Android, Windows and Linux, it was conceived by MIT graduate Drew Houston as a
solution to his habit of forgetting to carry his USB memory drive.
Dropbox
At heart, Dropbox is an online backup
service that uses client applications on its various supported platforms to
automatically copy data to its servers, and from there pass it down to other
clients logged in to the same account. That makes it sound more complicated
than it is to use. On a Mac or PC, it sets up a folder called Dropbox in
whichever location you choose - by default, inside your home folder - in which
to organize your synced files. Dragging a new file into this folder uploads it
to the server; a client app, which sits in the OS X menu bar, monitors online
changes instigated by other machines logged in to the same account and pulls
them down to the same local folder.
(We should pause here to clarify that
Dropbox has no connection with the DropBox folder you’ll find inside your OS X
Public folder. That’s an Apple feature which is used to simplify file sharing
on a local network.)
On the iPad and iPhone, a Dropbox app lets
you view a wide range of file types in situ and open some in third-party apps
for editing.
You can even sync your iPhoto library over
Dropbox by saving it in the synchronized Dropbox folder. Bear in mind, though,
that if you often import or alter a large number of images, you’ll pass a lot
of data over your broadband connection doing this, which could break a monthly
data cap.
Everything happens in the background, so
you don’t need to actively manage the sync process or take responsibility for
making sure you’re always working on the most up- to-date version of a file -
although you can perform bespoke uploads by simply dragging them into the
Dropbox browser window.
You
can even sync your iPhoto library over Dropbox by saving it in the synchronized
Dropbox folder
Dropbox also replicates MobileMe’s basic
collaboration tools by letting you share a new or existing folder with
colleagues (they’ll receive an email containing a link to the files) or allow
other Dropbox users share files with you, at which point their own shared
folders will appear in your Dropbox web interface.
Note, though, that if someone shares files
with you from their own Dropbox account, the contents of their shared
folder will be counted against your allocated disk space, as well as
their own - so it’s important to unsubscribe from other users’ shared folders
when you no longer need them: log in at dropbox.com and click Sharing >
Options > Members > Leave folder.
As your online Dropbox archive is effectively
a mirror of your local Dropbox folder, the installation routine sets it up to
appear in the Finder sidebar. In this respect it apes the MobileMe iDisk once
again. However, it currently lacks the ability to connect using a transfer tool
like Transmit, and despite plenty of discussion in the Dropbox forums, there’s
not yet an FTP facility.
You can sign up for a free 2GB account at
dropbox.com. If you sign up through db.tt/ NupFuK6 instead, you’ll get an extra
500MB free. So will MacUser - it’s a referral scheme.
For more extensive use, 50GB and 100GB
accounts cost $99 and $199 a year respectively. There’s also an enterprise
version for team use that starts at $795 per year for five years with unlimited
storage.
Dropbox at a glance
Dropbox at a glance
1. Shortcuts to all your shared folders are found in the Sharing tab.
You can stop sharing a folder, or opt out of a folder shared with you by
another user, from here
2. If you’re syncing across several Macs and mobile devices, the Events
tab makes it easy to keep an eye on changes by listing actions performed on
your own files and the contents of shared folders in date order
3. The two people on this folder icon Indicate that it’s been shared
with other users. In this case we’ve shared it ourselves, but if it was shared
by another user it would adopt the same icon
4. Dropbox doesn't immediately remove files from your account when you
delete them. Deleted files are hidden by default, but clicking the trash can
shows them In grey; click one to open a file history
To save you logging in to your Dropbox
account on a regular basis, you can also subscribe to a list of changes using
any RSS reader. Click the RSS button to access the feed.
