My first R&R is upon us and you know what that means… while I’m away, SchutzHappens will be a little less substance and little more fluff. Or, as I like to call it, ‘the usual’.
Disclaimer, I am in no way affiliated with digitaldropbox.com. Sure, I would like to have a corporate sponsor, but Microsoft didn’t even stop by to say ‘hi’ after I declared Word SchutzHappens official work processor. So, I have ZERO expectations. I just want to tell you about a service that ROCKS!
Anyway, for those of you living abroad… or away from your families, digitaldropbox.com is a life saver, especially when it’s time for me to put together our monthly family music videos.
When I first arrived in Pakistan, we weren’t even sure if we’d be able to maintain our videos. How in the world would Serena get me her pictures and videos?
Due to how slow our mail service is, mailing CDs was out of the question (it would take two months to get to me).
So, Serena tried sending me links to digital photo albums via Picasa and Facebook. These services are great for sharing albums, but terribly time consuming for retrieving and downloading photos (I would have to blowup each individual thumbnail and initiate separate downloads for each photo). Plus, it was hard to share our videos, in a format I could easily download, using these services.
After that, I set-up an account of www.photobucket.com. I really thought we were going to like this service. You can create photo albums and then bulk download every picture and video compressed in a zip file. It worked really great the first time… except our free photobucket.com account would only allow us to post 500 MB at a time. In many cases, Serena wasn’t able to upload all of our pictures and videos at one time. I would have to log on, download everything, purge all of our files on the website, and then tell Serena she could upload the rest. The second month I was here she had enough material for three separate transactions. That’s just too much to coordinate.
And, I know what you’re probably thinking, “why didn’t you upgrade to photobuckets unlimited space account?” Well, that’s a good question. First, I’m never going to join or upgrade anything unless I like the product. Second, Serena and I had nothing but problems uploading and downloading to photobucket.com. Numerous times, Serena would start an upload before going to bed and it would only be 50% complete the next morning. In turn, I would constantly receive error messages while trying to initiate a bulk download. It was just a mess. The technical issues weren’t worth gambling with an upgrade.
Finally, I found digitaldropbox.com. It looked good on paper and the free account allowed for 2 Gigs worth of space… so we gave it a shot and quickly fell in love.
It’s so easy! Serena and I downloaded a very simple piece of software that behaves like a normal folder, not unlike the ‘my documents’ folder… except it’s called ‘my dropbox’. Then, through the website, we linked our dropboxes together so they mirrored each other.
Now, whenever I save a file to ‘my dropbox’ folder the file is automatically sent to Serena’s ‘dropbox’ folder… and vice versa. So, to send me her pictures and videos every month all she needs to do is save them… she doesn’t have a initiate an upload or organize them in anyway… just save them. And, as long as we’re both connected to the internet, in a matter of minutes digitaldropbox will pop on with a message, ‘now acquiring new files’… and then it will immediate begin running in the background until it has successful transferred all the files. It doesn’t even matter if I lose my internet connection or turn my computer off… the process will continue where it left off automatically once the connection is restored.
Anyway, we’ve used this service for three months now without a single issue. It works the way it’s supposed to every time… and that seem pretty remarkable in this day and age.
In close, I just want to say ‘thank you’ to digitaldropbox for bringing a family a little closer together.
Huh… I know there’s an ad campaign in there somewhere, ;)
Talk to you guys when I get back!
