Nobody Paid Me to Say This: Dropbox

I'm in love with Dropbox. It's the cutest computer doohickey I have come across since I don't know when.

I work on (at least) two computers: desktop office and peripatetic laptop. I'm always having to cart stuff back and forth. I used to haul around boxes of 5.25 disks, then itty bitty disks. Then I would mail stuff back and forth, and then my little necklace USB key.

You can guess all the downsides: I'd lose them, I'd leave them in the wrong place, I'd load up inconsistent versions, blah blah.

Dropbox comes as near to protecting me against myself as anything I can find. You download Dropbox to both computers. You load it up with the files you're working on. Then Dropbox updaes automatically every time you boot up. There's a free version that gives you two gigs. For pay, you get up to 50G. I can't imagine needing the pay version: to keeep my life simple, I want not to be working on too many files at the same time.

I see it is still in Beta. If there is a catch, I haven't found it yet.

Oh: and don't confuse Dropbox with Mydropbox. That latter is an plagiarism policing program. Looks fine, but it's got nothing to do with my life.

BTW I also just lately discovered Evernote. That one is cool, too, although perhaps not quite as dazzling. Evernote did allow me to phase out Google Notebook--which, I gather, Google is going to phase out, too.

One more plug: I learn about this cool stuff from Lifehacker. Their "general living" stuff is pretty hokey, but their computer tips are mostly pretty cool (I do wish they would tell me what to do with the unstable WiFi on this &*^%! Sony Vaio, though!).