December 1

10 Features that Make Dropbox More Awesome

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Dropbox is one of the largest and most ubiquitous cloud storage services out there. Here are 10 features that make it super awesome.

  1. Restore Previous Versions of Files
    Have you ever had that sinking feeling when you realize you clicked Save instead of Save As and messed up your original document? Dropbox keeps older versions for you. Just right click on a file name on your desktop, or access the versions from your account on Dropbox.com.BONUS! Ransomware can lock up the files on your computer and demand money to release them. If you’re using Dropbox, you should be able to restore your files to the last-saved versions.
  2. Recover Deleted Files
    Oof. This one is a butt saver. If you accidentally delete a file, Dropbox gives you 30 days to restore it.
  3. Keep an Eye on Activities
    Dropbox helps you stay focused by listing recent events and activities on Dropbox.com. This is especially helpful when you’re sharing files and folders so you can see what your colleagues are working (or NOT working) on.
  4. Integrate Dropbox with All Kinds of Other Services
    Dropbox has, oh, I don’t know, about a billion integrations with other apps. My favorite trick for automating Dropbox storage and sharing is to use IFTTT to create little recipes that run in the background. Using IFTTT, you can automatically save your Instagram photos into a folder, dictate notes that Dropbox will transcribe, save your Tweets into a text file and much, much, much more.
  5. Collaborate with Colleagues
    Dropbox used to kinda suck in this area, and it still has a ways to go to be perfect. But recent improvements will help you work on documents with your peers. You can now add comments to a document (without the messy comment features in Office docs), and a badge will let you know when someone else is editing the document you access. Dropbox also introduced Paper this fall, with the idea of competing directly with the real-time collaboration of Google Drive.
  6. Work within Microsoft Office
    This feature is a wonderful improvement. Microsoft and Dropbox teamed up to let you access and save documents more easily to Dropbox.
  7. Watch Your Storage Space
    Dropbox gives you 2GB of storage for free (with plenty of ways to earn more), and these days a terabyte of storage is just $99 a year. Chances are your computer doesn’t have that much space. Dropbox lets you choose to store things in the cloud only instead of both locally and in the cloud. This lets you, for example, keep your huge video files from taking up space on your hard drive.
  8. Stay Secure (Kind of)
    If you’re online, you’re at risk of being hacked. Period. But you can protect yourself from hacks a little more by activating two-factor authentication with Dropbox and everything else you use.
  9. Automatically Backup Your Device Photos
    You can set Dropbox to sync your device photos with your account without having to manually transfer your pictures.
  10. Request Files
    Stop messing with file attachments on email by requesting files through this Dropbox feature.

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  • Hmmm. I was excited when you said you can use IFTTT to dictate notes and have Dropbox transcribe them — but I can’t figure out how to do that, nor can I find a pre-existing recipe on IFTTT. Can you share your secret??

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