Lokion Interactive

Drop­box, the file synch­ing and shar­ing ser­vice, is indis­pens­able to a lot of Lokion­ites. Once you install it on your desk­top and other devices, any file you upload to Drop­box is avail­able on any of your devices. They offer 2Gb of stor­age for free, with addi­tional free stor­age if you refer new members.

You can get Drop­box for your PC/Mac/Linux com­puter, Android, iOS, or other mobile device.

Here are some awe­some tips and tricks to get the most out of your Drop­box account:

1. Keep your Drop­box free: You can just keep all your files within Drop­box if you don’t mind pay­ing for extra stor­age. But with a few tricks and helper apps (tips 2 and 3 below) you can turn your Drop­box account into a fully auto­mated pipeline that copies and moves files around, orga­nizes them into the right fold­ers, and keeps your Drop­box stor­age from burst­ing out of the 2Gb free-storage limit.
2. Auto­mate your phone’s Drop­box­ing: If you have an Android device, you can tell Fold­er­Sync (free or pre­mium) to mon­i­tor cer­tain fold­ers on your phone and upload them to Drop­box auto­mat­i­cally. FolderSync’s free ver­sion uploads files on a sched­ule that you set, while the pre­mium ver­sion will upload them instantly.
   
   Join the con­ver­sa­tion in our com­ments: Who can tell us how to sim­i­larly auto­mate Drop­box uploads on iOS devices?
3. Auto­mate your desktop’s Drop­box­ing: Drop­box sets up fold­ers on your desk­top or lap­top that always mir­ror your online Drop­box fold­ers. That’s where Belvedere (PC) or Hazel(Mac) come into play. Either of these apps will auto­mat­i­cally move or copy files from one folder to another based on name, exten­sion, size, date, and so on.
   
   Set Belvedere or Hazel to mon­i­tor your Drop­box fold­ers for new files, then have them move those files into non-Dropbox fold­ers of your choice. That keeps your Drop­box fold­ers nearly empty and keeps you hap­pily in the free-storage zone. You can also tell Belvedere or Hazel to auto­mat­i­cally move files of a cer­tain type or loca­tion into Drop­box if you want to make them avail­able on your other devices.
4. Inte­grate Drop­box with your other cloud ser­vices: Otixo gives you a sin­gle inter­face for all your cloud stor­age ser­vices like Drop­box, Sky­Drive, and Google Drive. Mov­ing files between them is drag-and-drop easy. The awe­some If This Then That (IFTTT) lets you build “recipes” to auto­mat­i­cally copy, move, or change files between Drop­box and other online ser­vices like Face­book or Insta­gram. Take a look at the 2,700 recipes for Drop­box sub­mit­ted by IFTTT users.
5. Com­mit code to Drop­box: When he’s not writ­ing amaz­ing code for Lokion clients, devel­oper Ben Sum­mers uses Drop­box for his small per­sonal projects. He places a git repos­i­tory in his Drop­box folder and com­mits code to it. It’s a sim­ple, free alter­na­tive to a hosted repos­i­tory at github or bit­bucket, and he can access it from any­where. He shares two caveats: (1) Don’t do this for big pro­fes­sional projects, and (2) keep a copy some­where else in case the Drop­box repos­i­tory gets corrupted.