So, I talked about Dropbox in general, now I'll get to specifics on what I think is one of it's most useful features; versioning.

I'll be mainly talking about text, but you could easily adapt this to Photoshop files or Word files or whatever you work in. These techniques will work with any file on your computer, but just be aware of the 2GB limit.

• Working
  

  Synced Document in Dropbox

  You'll be working the way you always do, except you'll be working within the Dropbox folder in your computer's home folder. When you're connected to the Internet, every time you save the file, it will upload the change to the Dropbox site as an immediate remote backup. Feel free to create folders to organize your work. Dropbox will keep that file structure on the getdropbox.com site as well.

  When you see the green checkbox next to your file, you know that your file has been successfully saved to your online Dropbox.

• Revisions

  Dropbox will create a new revision each time you save your file. You will have access to all past revisions and can see when they were saved and how big the files are. If you right click on a file in your Dropbox folder, you'll get a Dropbox submenu that will take you to the revision list in your browser. From there you can save any past versions to your computer and, if you want to roll back to a previous version, just copy and paste it over the existing file in your Dropbox folder.

  

  Revision Menu

  One note to be aware of. If you rename or move a file, you will lose the revisions that related to it because Dropbox will think you deleted it. You can get to the old file by going into the getdropbox.com interface and selecting the Show Deleted Files button.

  

  Deleted Files

• Sharing

  If you right click on a folder, you can view it's sharing options. This will allow you to share your Dropbox folder and all of it's contents with another Dropbox user, provided you know their email address. If they aren't already signed up with Dropbox, this will also send them an invitation to join. It's a great way to keep a group of people in sync with important documents.

  More to the point, all versions of a document are tagged with the person's name who made it, so you'll know exactly who changed what within a file. And since every version is saved, you won't need to worry about overwriting someone else's changes. In fact, if two people edit the same file at the same time, Dropbox will actually notify you that it happened and allow you to fix it by giving you both files.

  

  Folder Sharing

  You can also drop things in the Public folder within Dropbox. This allows anyone to download the file through a simple web link. They won't be able to edit and upload the file back to your Dropbox, but it's a quick way to distribute files to users over email or IM to a group of people.

I think Dropbox is what I call an active file backup, meaning it backs up your work as you work on it. In fact, Dropbox is probably the best way of doing this I've seen, mainly because it's also a remote backup. If your computer dies in the middle of what you're doing, you haven't lost all of your changes and you'll be able to hop on another computer, install Dropbox and be back up and running.

You can find more about all of these features over at the Dropbox FAQ.

One of my favorite new online applications is Dropbox. Dropbox's main purpose is to keep a folder of files synchronized between multiple computers. It does this through an operating system plugin that you install, The most exciting part is it runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. So no matter what computers you use in a day or what operating systems they're running, you can keep all your files accessible and synced up, up to 2GB worth, for free.

Another feature I love is the ability to have shared folders with other users, right from your Dropbox to theirs. This is very cool if you're working on a project together or just want to share documents with the family. Instead of emailing files back and forth or setting up a complicated Version Control system, you can just share a folder in your Dropbox and work right off of the desktop.

Speaking of version control, Dropbox also stores all of the past revisions of all of your files. That means that whenever you're working on a file, every time you hit save, it stores a copy of the file at that time. Even if you delete the file from Dropbox, you can recover it using the getdropbox.com website.

This is an excellent way to keep a quick remote backup of actively worked on files. I love using it for text due to the built in versioning feature and the fact that whenever I hit save, it uploads a new version of my document. Also, with 2 gigabytes of space for free, that's plenty of room to work with. When I'm done actively working on something, I can move it to another folder that is part of my remote backup and frees up the space on Dropbox again.

My only slight problem is, even though Dropbox uses SSL to encrypt traffic to and from the Dropbox site and then encrypts my data on Dropbox's servers, Dropbox itself still has my encryption keys and can view my data whenever they please. I'm sure they don't, but I wouldn't exactly put my tax returns or a passwords file out there. I'm kind of a stickler for who has access to my data.

Even so, I recommend Dropbox for everyone who actively works on their computers. (Should be everyone, right?) If you do a lot of text editing or even graphic design and would cry if you lost something or overwrote something you're working on, working on it in a Dropbox folder that gets actively versioned could be a real life saver. Also, if you are constantly sharing files with others via email or IM, get Dropbox going on all of your machines and it'll make a world of difference in how you collaborate.

While Dropbox is not a full remote backup solution, it is great for what I call active file backups, incremental backups of actively changing files. I'm sure that it can fit in your workflow somewhere, so go and download it today.