dropbox

I f you are like me you travel with a number of flash drives. Some were given to me some were free. They have varying amounts of memory from 2 to 8 gigs. I have to open each one when I have forgotten where I have saved that very important file. I almost cried when I misplaced that bunch of drives that held that one important project. A while ago I was turned onto cloud computing. Cloud computing refers to, what I call.....out there (on the net), Saving items to a company that provides that service. At first I used a service called drop.io. The basic service is usually free, giving you a small amount of space to begin. There are always premium services that give you different size storage for your money. Anytime you needed that document you would log onto your account and there it is. Unfortunately, drop.io went away. They did give give me ample time to retrieve my documents before it closed its doors. One word of caution here, I NEVER upload any sensitive or irreplaceable documents. As I lamented over the loss of drop.io, I went back to my flash drives. Then one day, after surfing the Web 2.0 tools, I have found the greatest cloud saving service ever.Its called Drop Box.  Similar to drop.io, in the fact that it gives you a free basic setup account of two gigs, but it gives you more. After you create an account you, you download a small piece of software and I installed it on my computer.  The software places its icon on my tray and desktop.  Here is where the similarity with drop.io ends.  Not only can you see your documents on the dropbox website ( which is the last thing you want to do), but all you have to do is click on the desktop icon or the icon on the tray and there are your documents.  It is the same as if your flash drive was plugged into your computer.  But the great thing is you can set up your account on anycomputer that you want and as many as you want.   They all sync in real time.  For a teacher that does a great deal of work at home,  this is invaluable.  I can sit in my living room working on that worksheet save it to dropbox.  The next morning click on my Drop Box icon and whoop there it is.  I know what your thinking, suppose that I am somewhere where I don't have my computer, what will I do?  All you need to do is, go to the dropbox website log on and get my document.
The other neat feature, is the ability to have a shared folder.   It doesn't get better than this.  By the way this is MAC and PC compatible.

Go to their site watch the video. 

If you would like to see a wide range of saving files to the cloud,  go here.