Sharing Files With Team Members and Clients

Busy Virtual Assistants need an easy way to share files with our team members and our clients.  While we all have USB drives and certainly know how to use Send This File or another large file transfer service, these are not always practical choices for those of us with multiple computers, or multiple locations.

Fortunately GetDropBox is an application that works like a regular desktop folder, but when you drag files into it they can be seen and modified by anybody on your team who has permissions to view the folder. GetDropBox also saves previous versions of documents so you don’t lose important material. For instance, I have a HUGE “My Pictures” file. Being a web developer as well as a virtual assistant, this is a file that I am in daily. GetDropBox has a built-in photo gallery that allows me to drag photos to the “photos” folder and they are instantly available on the web if needed.

One very important piece of information you need is this. Dropbox is replicating copies of your data across your computers as well as on their servers. Copies of your data are always stored on your own machines, rather than online-only. If your online storage suffers a catastrophic failure, your precious data could be lost forever. Since it also resides on your local machine, this is not a worry. This also means that should you decide that Dropbox is not for you, you still have complete control of your data.

Dropbox offers a free account with 2GB of storage. They also offer Dropbox Pro for $9.99/month or $99/year for people who want richer sharing options and more storage.

Here is how it works:

Once you have downloaded GetDropBox, there is a folder placed in your “My Documents” folder named “My Dropbox”. From there, any files placed in this folder will be uploaded to the Dropbox servers and will synchronize with any other clients in your account. What this means is that in a single computer situation, you have effectively created a backup solution. If you have multiple computers listed in your account, all files placed in the folder on one computer will automatically be synced onto all others running Dropbox in the same account. Painless. 

The web interface is also like a virtual time machine that remembers every change you ever make. You can view or restore any previous version of any file. You can even undelete files that you have discarded. In our virtual world, this can be a life saver!