DropBox - online storage and syncing

Today I taught the final class of the five that I've given the last five weeks at the FHC. The class was about Dropbox and "the cloud" which is basically online storage. Dropbox also allows you to share files with others so it is an easy way to share your genealogy data and photos online. It makes sense to store your important family history online as well as at home on portable devices. I had an external hard drive fail recently and although most of the data and images are on computers I wish I had had some of that data online. Dropbox also syncs files between your computers, tablet and smart phone. Dropbox is easy to download and install - very user friendly. I've used Dropbox for over a year and I totally recommend it as a great tool to share and store your genealogy.

Recently Google announced their new online storage/cloud, Google Drive, which also syncs with your home computer. Google Drive gives you 5 gigabytes of storage free and more at a reasonable price. It is a conversion of Google Docs so you can also edit your documents, spreadsheets and such.
There is a comparison chart of 13 of the online storage/cloud providers in an article by Ellis Hamburger:
 Google Drive vs. Dropbox, SkyDrive, SugarSync, and others: a cloud sync storage face-off

Following are the points I made during the class.

• Dropbox is an online repository where you can store almost any type of data in the “cloud”
• That “Data Cloud” is accessible wherever you have an internet connection
• Dropbox has the ability to connect multiple devices to the cloud and sync new data and updates instantaneously to each of those devices.
• Dropbox has the ability to share folders with other users
• Dropbox gives you the first 2 gigabytes of data storage free with the ability to gain more
  
  
  Here is a video by Dropbox telling about itself: