Dropbox has changed the way I use computers and how we are writing our books

I have always had problems effectively working with multiple computers at work and at home. Primarily, I use a Thinkpad x200 for work, and at home, I use a 27" iMac and a MacBook Air. For years, I've struggled with keeping my active files for projects available to me when I need them. Sometimes it's a draft chapter that I need to work on, or a presentation I need to finish, or a spreadsheet I want to work on with my wife.

Until a couple of weeks ago, I routinely would email myself working files or documents I had to myself, just so I could work on them on different computers. And of course, every once in awhile, I will be missing a file I need. Which would require me to log into a different computer, and email myself another file or two. Or three.

Or maybe where I'm working won't have Internet access, so I'll have to use a USB drive. Or worst of all, I spend hours working on a file, but I forget to email myself the final version. So then I have to redo all the work.

When this happens, it's so frustrating, I want to throw away all but one computer. And in actuality, this problem is large enough that I primarily use my work laptop, even though a much better computing environment exists.

So, I've suffered with this problem for years. Until I discovered two utilities: SugarSync and Dropbox. Both are marketed as ways to backup, sync and share your files in the cloud. Both have radically changed the way I use my computers, both for home and at work.

I've started using SugarSync to sync up project folders across all my computers. I'm absolutely loving it. I'm amazed at how easy it is to keep files synchronized across PCs and Macs (and even iPhones), regardless of the size of file. I started paying for SugarSync, and was very happy with it, until I found that I couldn't share files and have my wife access files in her Mac Finder window. Instead, she would need to go to a web page to download the files. Huh? I might as well ask her to upload photos to an FTP server! It wasn't quite the user experience I was hoping for...

Then, a friend recommended Dropbox, which allows seamless sharing of shared directories. So, I dropped SugarSync, and am now paying from Dropbox, because the user experience is so much better. Whether a file is shared between computers or between different people, you can still do everything using Windows Explorer or the OS X Finder, without going to a web page.

In fact, we're now using Dropbox to share files for our next upcoming book, instead of using the BZR version control system.

Incidentally, when we wrote the Visible Ops and Visible Ops Security books, we had an authorship team of three people. Mostly, we'd be emailing Word documents to and from each other. In our upcoming book project, we again have three authors, but because it's a novel, we have many more moving parts: character development docs, the fictitious company financials and stock price, application descriptions, plot lines at a 100K foot level, chapter outlines at the 50K foot level, and then chapter drafts.

Using BZR required getting an FTP server set up, training ourselves to type in 'bzr add' everytime we added a file, 'bzr commit' everytime we updated a file, etc. It was tedious and often we'd forget to do this.

In comparison, now that we've switched to Dropbox, everything is like magic. Whenever anyone updates a file, we all get it when we're connected to the network.

We'll never go back to the old way.