Welcome to my new weekly feature! Tools of the trade will hopefully run every Friday and I’ll try to stick to that as much as possible. I have six “tools” planned to talk about I may feature more if I can think of any especially with going back to University soon, I will start writing more, therefore using more! So let’s get it started.
This weeks tool: Dropbox
The “tool” I will be talking about is Dropbox, a free on-line back up service which offers you up to 2GB of cloud storage for all your documents.
You make an account on the website and download a small program for your computer, what this then does is create a folder on your computer title “Dropbox” and will appear in Windows Explorer or the OSX equivalent.
On Windows 7 it is added to your “favorites” section for ease of access.
And that’s it really, everything else is automatic as long as you have the Dropbox client running which, by default, automatically starts when your computer does. The program is unobtrusive and does not impede your computers performance in any way. So all that’s left for you to do is save your documents to the folder and the program does the rest, you can see the status of your Dropbox folder by the symbol that appears in the task bar.
As you can see when there is a green tick next to the logo then you’re good to go, everything is in sync. 
When it is currently in the process of syncing then a blue symbol appears with two arrows circling one another.
The best use of this software for me is that if you have a a PC and a laptop as long as you are logged into the account on both devices then your files are always with you, as long as you have internet connection. This certainly beats having to mess around with pen drives getting files from one computer to another as it just works seamlessly and does it all for you.
Not only this but you can have shared files with other users, so for example me and my other writer friend Luke Knowles have a shared folder on Dropbox that lets us share files with each very quickly without needing to attach emails etc, I just drop the file in and he gets it on his computer! And through the website you can share your work to social media outlets and show your work to your friends that way too!
And of course as there is an App for everything nowadays there is both an Android App and an iOS App for Dropbox, which means you can access all your files on your favourite tablet devices and smart phones.
Then of course you can use the website to download your files too so if you’re on someone else PC or a public computer in a library for example all your files are there.
But the best feature? When you sign up you get your 2GB free, but then for everyone you refer you get an extra 500MB of space, up to a maximum of 18GB. You can also subscribe to the service getting even more space if you need that much!
So if you’re interested use this following link to sign up! (And earn me some more free space too obviously!)
