Many of you have probably heard of DropBox, a program created by some MIT students to make file synchronization between computers easier.  When I heard about it on digg, I signed up for a beta invitation, and finally got one a couple days ago.  What better way to try out a new beta than to blog about my experience.

First, I was disappointed that there is NOT (yet) a linux client.  I know there’s a web interface (keep in mind, I haven’t done anything with it yet), but I found out that in order to create your account, you have to be using a windows computer.  I will post later whether or not dropbox works with WINE, but since I have a windows computer, I just had to continue from there.

The invite e-mail gives you a link with an installer download.  It tells you your beta code, and let’s you know that you’ll need it.  The steps displayed at the top of the page are “1. Download Dropbox, 2. Link your computer, 3. Get started.”  Easy enough.  The installer came in at 7.1 MB, which isn’t terrible for the kind of application it claims to be.  It took me a couple seconds to download it on my high speed.

While installing dropbox, explorer crashed, but came back up in a few seconds.  I noticed I now have a dropbox icon in the system tray.  After I closed the installer, and allowed my firewall to let dropbox through (I noticed it was going over the HTTPS port… very good!), a new firefox tab opened.  At this point, I noticed that dropbox’s website is currently being VERY slow.  This page should have taken a second or two to load, but is taking… a long time.

I filled in the details, and clicked “Register and link” — Almost immediately, the dropbox program notified me that I had linked the account, and that there were five new files.  My synced folder was put in “C:\Documents and Settings\User\My Documents\My Dropbox”, and there was a file called “This is your dropbox.txt” containing:

Anything you put in this folder is seamlessly uploaded to Dropbox
and available online.

We’d love to hear what you think. E-mail us at …@getdropbox.com
or visit our forums (…) anytime.

- The Dropbox Team

Just to be on the safe side, I’ve removed the e-mail address and forums link from the post.  There was also a folder called “Photos” and one called “Public.”  In photos, there was three generic pictures, and in public, there was a file called “Top Secret.txt” containing:

You can get a public link for any file in your Dropbox’s Public folder.

Simply right click (or control click) on a file, click the Dropbox submenu,
and then click ‘Copy public link.’

Sure, enough, I right clicked, went to the Dropbox submenu, and clicked “Copy public link,” and http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/46230/Top%20Secret.txt was copied to my clipboard.  There was also a “Revisions” item in that menu, but I’ll worry about that later.  I wanted to know what happens if I right click dropbox in the system tray.  What happened was… I got a small menu (big surprise).  One of the items linked me to the web interface and told me I was using 0.1% of 2.0 GB.  It also provided a feedback item, an update item (grayed out), an “Open my dropbox” item (which opened the folder on my computer), and an exit item.  Now, for some small tests.

You all know I have complained about filedropper not working well with large files, so I decided to upload my large 189 MB file to my Public folder first.  It copied quickly, because it was just copying to a different harddrive, but it was given a blue “sync” icon, instead of the normal green “OK” icon.

The system tray icon also had an animated “syncing” icon, and right clicking showed “Uploading 1 file (xxx.x KB/sec, 21 min left)” grayed out, instead of update.  So, how that went will be coming in another post…

Besides, it’s now time to check out the web interface.  I simply clicked the link in the menu of the system tray icon, and was taken there.  I think a screenshot will be able to explain this much better than I can, so I’ll just post one.  This was taken right after I gave dropbox a “thumbs up” (they asked for feedback on the left side, in the menu).

What I thought was really nice was the “photos” section.  If I put photos in my photos dropbox folder, it automatically creates a gallery link that I can share with other people.  So, here’s my dropbox gallery (nothing interesting there, yet): http://www.getdropbox.com/gallery/46230/0/?h=5b7699

The file browser was nice and simple, which I expected it to be, and allowed me to view revisions, so I decided to check that out.  I looked at that, and it shows who did the revision (for shared folders, more on that in a different post, later), when the revision was made, the size of the file at that revision, and it allows you to download that revision.  Unfortunately, they don’t seem to have parallel uploading, so even though I made a change to the small “Top Secret.txt” file, it won’t show up until my big file is done uploading. Nevermind, just took a bit longer than I expected.  The revisions interface also allows you to easily restore an earlier revision.  It’s also worth noting that the right click menu, back in the actual application, has a revisions item that just takes you to the web interface.

So, overall my first impression of dropbox is that it’s a very nice product.  I haven’t encountered any bugs yet, which is good, I suppose.  I’ll keep testing dropbox as much as I can in the next couple weeks, and blog more about it.