My friend introduced me to Dropbox because he wanted to transfer some songs to me. I was impressed with the download speeds and the ease of use of the Dropbox so I decided to use it to share files with my freelancers.

Dropbox Plans

The free verision comes with 2 GB of disk space. You can get up to 3GB of extra space free just for referring your friends to Dropbox. Each new friend you refer to Dropbox will enable you to have an extra 250 MB of space. What that means is if you refer 12 or more new people to Dropbox, you will get 3 GB of free space added to your free account. 5 GB of free space is quite a lot if you’re only planning to share documents and instructional videos like me.

The paid version comes with 50 GB of disk space. at $9.99 per month. The free disk space promotion applies to the paid accounts at double the size. Instead of a maximum of 3 GB of additional space, you get 6 GB. Every new member you refer to Dropbox will get you 500 MB of disk space instead of 250 MB.

How Does Dropbox Work?

You may use Dropbox purely online or you may install a program that creates a virtual folder on your computer. I installed the Windows version and I now have a Dropbox folder in my hard drive. Whenever I store files into the public folder or shared folders of my Dropbox folder, the software automatically uploads the files to Dropbox’s server.

You may generate links from the Dropbox and let your friends download the files. Another way would be to ask your friend to install Dropbox and you could invite your friend to share a particular folder of your Dropbox. The files from the shared folder will be automatically downloaded to your friends Dropbox on his or her computer. That’s how the syncing feature works.

Other Uses of Dropbox

You could also use Dropbox for backing up your files. This works okay for small files but if you prefer to create image files of your hard drive, the uploading may take forever and it might not be ideal to use the Dropbox for large backups