A few days ago I had a discussion with some people, sparked by my question, “Why is everyone so worshipful of Dropbox?” By and large, nobody had a great answer, but assuming I distilled their answers correctly it seems to come to a few small things, and if those things are important to you then it’s a winner. These are features mentioned in this article, such as the versioning and multi-device syncing.

…Aaaaaand for the most part, people were also sold on their clever and friendly marketing. Marketing wins most of these wars. (See also: Apple)

There are tonnes of tools out there that will do the same thing as Dropbox. Some might do it better for your needs. But you’d be hard-pressed to find one as simple and effective.

Despite the Devil’s Advocate nature of the above, I think Dropbox was in fact well executed and everyone looking for something in the “online storage and syncing” sphere should at least give it a try to see if it’s for them.

I have Dropbox installed but I dont use so much and maybe its because I havent figured out how to use properly yet.

What I am using is Sugarsync https://www.sugarsync.com/. With this program you get a lot of the same features, but with Sugarsync you can choose which folders on you computer you want it to backup automatically. And I can set it to run automatic backups on as many folders I choose to. This is what I dont like about Dropbox. Dropbox chooses one folder for you. Works also on Mac, Windows and iPhone. The iPhone app is not so strong though. You also get 2GB free account here.

If I am missing something then please enlighten me. :-)

Cordially
Vayu

It sounds very similar to a version control system such as Subversion. At my last job we used SVN to maintain backups and revisions of our databases. I was considering doing something similar at home / work but now I might just use dropbox instead and not have to worry about managing my own repos.