There is a new service that everyone has been praising and it’s called Dropbox. So far, it is the best example of what the power of the cloud can do. It is one of the few good cloud services that is brought to you by a company not named Google. There seems to be a lot of confusion when people use the term cloud. It is not anything magical that is hard to figure out. It mostly means that you have brought a service that is typically done on the desktop onto a server. Even though the term “cloud” has been used a lot lately, the actual ideal of the cloud has been around for a long time now. When you use your email service online, then you are using a cloud based piece of software. But with the drop in cost of both the hardware and the software to set it up, more and more start ups are starting their services on the cloud.  And Dropbox is one of the best of the bunch.

When you use the Dropbox service, it is like you are adding another hard drive to your computer. Dropbox is a data hosting service that allows you to place your data on the cloud. The service is unique in two different ways. The first way is that the data that is saved on their host servers is actually encrypted and is stored multiple places unlike your hard drive. So when you access the data, you have a secured connection. And if anything goes wrong with their servers, they have the data stored in more than one place so it will not be lost. Also the service is unique in the fact that it allows you to store your data on several computers at the same time. To do this, you have a special shared Dropbox folder. Any files that you place in that folder are automatically sent to their servers. After it is sent to their servers, it is then loaded up to the other computers that are logged on to your account. Those other computers will get that same files as well. Now if you go to use the other computers, then you will be able to access the files since they are already on there.

Now that you see what the service can do, it is probably real easy to see why you should use this service to back up your important data. Not only will you have the safe security in knowing that your data is being backed up on multiple secured servers, but also that it is being encrypted as well. This is a big plus for anyone who is worried that their important data may be lost. With dropbox, the likelihood of that happening is very low.

So if you have important data, then you might want to think of using a service such as Dropbox to secure it.