Dropbox for Windows

Dropbox is a simple, powerful and free way to ensure you always have your documents to hand without messing about with USB memory keys. It copies all the files in a folder to an online storage account and updates them on all of the computers logged in with your Dropbox details.

As well as being a easy way of backing up documents, it's invaluable when you are working on more than one computer.

The basic Dropbox account that costs nothing to use offers 2GB of storage space. This can be extended by recommending Dropbox to friends. An extra 250MB is added to an account for every friend who signs up, to a maximum of 8GB.

Installation is simple and includes signing up for a Dropbox account if you don't have one already. The default folder is called My Dropbox and is created in your (My) Documents folder. It can be moved or another nominated in its place.

If this is not the first installation, Dropbox will automatically start downloading documents from the online storage. An icon appears in the Notification Area that shows if it is synchronising files. Hover the cursor over this icon for more information.

If there is a another computer with Dropbox installed on your local network, it will download the files from there rather than the internet. This is faster and avoids problems with bandwidth restrictions on broadband accounts.

Dropbox 1 has a new feature that enables you to select particular folders to be synchronised within the Dropbox folder. This is useful with the Pro accounts if you just want to keep important Word documents on a netbook but not a video collection.

Dropbox 1 can also synchronise resource forks, areas of files used to store important information by many Mac programs. This makes Dropbox even better when working with different operating systems. There is a Linux version as well.

There are two paid for accounts. The Pro 50 account has 50Gb of space for US$9.99 a month or US$99 a year. The Pro 100 has 100GB for US$19.99 a month or US$199 a year.

The forum post announcing with links for the Linux and Mac OS X versions can be found here.

According to Dropbox, this update should be performed automatically if you already have it installed. If this did not happend on your PC, simply run this download to upgrade.