Dropbox

Talking with another friend today I became aware of a handy Internet solution for sharing and accessing documents: Dropbox It allows you to sync your files online and across your computers (work/home/phone)  automatically and share the documents you want with others. You never have to e-mail yourself a file again. It gives you an automatic backup of your files online, keeps files synced between computers and makes sharing files with others easy.

From a work point of view, I think this will be useful as I won't have to send documents to myself to/from work (very tidious and potentially fraught with the danger of mixing up the versions...). Many of the academics I work with have co-authors and this should be a handy tool for them who have papers they are jointly working on (apparently The Professor was already aware of this and had used it with co-authors...).

For us with two households it will be a way of keeping useful house related documents handy so both The Professor and I can access the information even if we are in two different cities.

I guess this could also be a way of storing pictures and sharing with friends and family. The point is that you only share those files that you want to.

The website uses the example of a guy who used Dropbox to store any documents he might need as he was on a major round the world trip.

I like smart solutions like this!