I do a lot of work for a wide array of people and companies. A lot of times that work is done remotely via some kind of vpn or remote desktop or thin client (citrix) that keeps my local files completely separate and unavailable on the remote machine. However, sometimes I need to share a file between the two machines yet there is no way to do so.

For instance with some of the client machines I can’t ftp, I can’t email out a large (over 5mb attachment), I can’t ssh or rsynch or anything else that might help me move a file between the two locations. For a while I had a good solution in strongsafe.com but that server was eventually blocked by one or more of the client firewalls.

In general they have very very good reasons for blocking this stuff; they really want to make it hard for sensitive stuff from getting out of the house. However, the things I need to move around are often large images, or development libraries (dlls, jars, etc) that I work on locally (where there is no keyboard lag) and then I want to push them to the client machine for use in the overall project. I really need a way to share these files to maximize my productivity and now, thankfully, getdropbox.com is on the scene to solve my problem - at least temporarily (so long as my files aren’t more than 2gb in size).

With getdropbox I just install the app and it creates a pseudo-directory on my machine. Then any file I plop in that directory is automatically pushed to any other machine that I have linked to my getdropbox.com account. It works over the clients http proxy and it works pretty well. So far I’ve only tested it out with small files but I feel like this is going to be a good way to move forward (well, until they block it too).

Getdropbox.com
just came out of private beta this week so if you are looking for a good way to synch or share files you might want to give them a look. It’s free, encrypted, and pretty damn easy to use.

Comments

Nexus Rex

Never mind - I figured it out. GetDropBox uses a Python client and Amazon S3 (simple storage service).

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Travis Cable

Nexus Rex

Anybody know what they built GetDropBox with? Java, Python, C+?

daryljames

Thanks for the heads up. Sometimes it’s hard to tell them all apart.

Bill

so far I’m happy. I haven’t had to use it much but it works like a charm and fills a definite need I had.

Elvis

How has your experience with it been so far? I just installed it yesterday to share files between my computer at work and at home.