Advice: Stuck sending emails with big attachments? Get Dropbox and let the magic happen…

It’s happened to the best of us – we try to send an email to a client, colleague, or family member, and we cram in one too many attachments. We press ‘send’, and wait for the progress bar of life to tell us that our email is on it’s merry way when – uh oh – it bounces back to us with a gibberish technical message saying, in effect: ‘too big, try again’.

Murphy’s Law will dictate that it’s the urgent emails sent to meet critical deadlines that bounce back to us. It’s hugely annoying!

For some reason, half the world has set a limit on the maximum size of emails – 10Mb seems to be the most you can safely send to another person before you start getting your emails bouncing back…

I say ‘half the world’, because the 10Mb limit is a purely arbitrary one, and not imposed by everyone’s email providers – but it’s so common that you can never guarantee if your recipient will get your email.

10Mb isn’t a lot these days, it’s really only a half dozen full resolution digital photos, or a couple of sales brochures sent as PDFs, or maybe even something so simple as a Word document full of charts and graphs.

So… let me show you an awesome bit of *free* technology that lets you send and recieve files of any size across this Internet – and it all happens as if by magic.

Get Dropbox

Dropbox is a free program that creates a folder on your hard drive, and anything that you put in that folder gets securely uploaded to the Internet, ready to share with anyone you choose.

Available for Mac, PC and Linux *and* accessible from anywhere via the web at getdropbox.com, it’s as seamless and painless a process as possible – it’s one of those applications that’s so smart, it’s becoming a standard tool for any well-connected business.

Getting Started

First up, head to getdropbox.com and click on the huge ‘download’ button – it’s kinda hard to miss.

Download it, click to install it, and then you’ll be asked for your email and a password. Your email is unique to you (which is a good thing!) so the email you choose will become your username that others can find you by, and share folders with you. More on that in a minute.

For Macs, you’ll see new icon in your top menu, and for PCs, you’ll notice a new icon in the bottom right of your screen in your system tray.

For Macs, you’ll also notice a new folder called ‘Dropbox’ in your Home folder, and for PCs, you’ll see a folder called ‘My Dropbox’ right next your your My Documents, My Pictures, My Music folders.

In both cases, it’s a relatively empty folder. Let’s do something to change that right now, ey?

Backup important files to ‘the cloud’

One super-simple and super-safe thing to do is to use your Dropbox as an off-site backup. Remember, you’ve got 2Gb for free, that’s 2000Mb – or around 200 x 10Mb files that would have bounced back had you sent them via email!

Make a new folder inside your Dropbox, call it ‘backups’, and drag in (or copy/paste in) some important files… Here’s where the magic happens – once you drop in a file, your Dropbox icon spins around, and depending on your internet connection, a few seconds/minutes later, the file is *both* on your hard drive *and* on the internet. Lovely!

Sharing between you and yourself

OK, so one-way backups are dead easy, but the next trick is to be able to set up two computers to let you access the same Dropbox. Easy! Just head to getdropbox.com and download the application again, but this time, when prompted, don’t create a new account, just sign in with the email address and password you used previously.

Dropbox will then download all the files that were in your Dropbox to this new computer, and from this day forward, everything will stay in perfect syncronisation – when you change a file on one computer, it’ll automatically change on the other computer a couple of seconds later.

The advantage of this scenario is if you work on files both at work AND at home – by the time you press ‘save’ on a document in your Dropbox at work, and walk out to your car, the freshly saved file is already on it’s way to your home computer, ready for you to work on that evening. Very smart.

Sharing between other Dropbox users

To share files with other people is just as easy, and similarly, the files stay syncronised all the time – whenever one party adds or updates a file, the other party gets it seconds or minutes later, without any effort.

If you click your Dropbox icon, there an option to visit the ‘Web Interface’. From here, your browser opens, and you can see the folders on your hard drive, but on the web site.

Next to each folder name is a dropdown arrow, which brings up the sharing options. In the sharing options screen is a simple text box where you type in the email of the person you want to share that folder with. If they’re already using Dropbox, then it’s a piece of cake, they’ll get an email inviting them to your shared folder. If they’re new to it all, they’ll be invited to do what we’ve just done, and give Dropbox a try. Not hard at all – and fully automatic once it’s set up.

I’d suggest making a new folder for each ‘share’ you’d like to set up, and give the new folder an obvious name. Something like ‘James + AB’ as a folder name for files that both James and ‘AB’ will share should be eternally obvious. You’ll both see the same folder name, so you’ll have to fight for whose name is first!

You can try right-clicking on a folder within your dropbox to go direct to the web interface for that folder, to set up or edit who sees what.

There doesn’t seem to be a limit to he number of people who can share a folder – so you could conceivably have your whole workforce all looking into one common folder of the most recent/updated/correct sales data, for instance.

Sharing with ‘the public’

In your Dropbox, you’ll see two folders created for you: ‘photos’ and ‘public’.

Whatever you put in your public folder, you can go to the web interface, and get a ‘public URL’ (web address) for.

This means that you can put large files up online, and just email the recipient a mall email, with the link to where the file is online – then move the files out of the public folder once you’re all done. Easy peasy…

Photos are the same theory, so that you can upload a range of images, sorted by putting them in different folders, then show them off to invited guests.

There are plenty of other photo-sharing web sites around: Flickr, Picasa, etc etc – but not any that are this convenient.

Extending Dropbox

You get 2Gb of storage free on Dropbox, and for most of us, that’ll do us nicely. There is a paid upgrade to 50Gb for US$10/month or US$100/year. That’s reasonable is you really take to the service and you really want 100%-stress-free off-site backups. Sure, $100 would buy you a 100Gb portable hard drive, but how often would you press the ‘backup’ button, and how often would that drive leave your premises…? Thought so. We all have good intentions about a backup plan, but you simply can’t beat ‘stress-free’.

There’s also an ‘undo’ button found on the web interface, so you can retrieve accidentally deleted files from your dropbox – instant backup AND stuff-up protection!

So…

I’d say I’ve convinced you to give Dropbox a try to help your business with sending large files, syncronising your remote workers, and making the easiest off-site backups in history…

…and no, I don’t get any kickbacks (I wish!) – just a warm fuzzy glow if I’ve helped you in some small way.

AB out