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Comment by gfodor | Hacker News Reader

Ok, I'll bite. What do people actually use dropbox for? All of my employer's code is in SVN, and personal code on Github. All of my email and my calendar is on Gmail. All my photos are on Facebook. All of my documents are in Google Apps. My writing is on my blog. My TODO list is in Workflowy.

If my computer dies (which it has recently) all of my stuff is covered. Is there some area of content creation that I am just missing altogether? I guess I don't back up my photoshop or audio work I do occasionally on dropbox, but that's probably not it.

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Dozens of things:

If I stick PDFs on it, I can view it on all my computers and devices. This holds for both contracts and ebooks.

If I stick pictures in the public directory, I can quickly show them to people

If I stick zip files in the public directory, it's faster than uploading to an SSH site

If do photoshop/fireworks/balsamiq mockups work out of dropbox, it's on all the computers, and can be pulled up on an iPad in a customer location.

If I stick the scanner on one computer with the output directory in dropbox, I can connect the scanner to one of the desktops, then have it automagically copy over to my mac laptop when done.

Many of us just want a folder that syncs.

I work inside dropbox. Means I can leave my desk and pick my air and go and work somewhere else without thinking about it and without relying on a network connection. As a special bonus there is an extra level of backup (on top of the mercurial repositories, the jungle disk and my time machine - I'm kind of paranoid about backups. However when I had a hard disk failure a few months ago on my main disk on my main machine I barely even noticed)

I can just pass things over to my colleagues by shoving them in a folder. For project documentation where ever I am I have the latest copies.

Access via my phone means I can usually pick up things I have forgotten easily as well.

I do have almost all the rest of my data in the cloud - but for stuff that is local Dropbox is the next best thing

Remember, not everyone is a hacker. For my non geek friends, Dropbox is magic. It just works.

I could imagine the world 1000000 times better if everyone can fire up a shell and do something with that. Sadly it's not the case.

Yeah my point here wasn't that I don't understand how Dropbox is useful in general, it's just that this article is by a hacker and he says Dropbox is the "best piece of software written in the last 5 years" and I seem to survive without using it whatsoever.

Being able to send files to people makes sense, but 9 times out of 10 e-mail does the job there just fine. I'm still not getting it, I guess :) Maybe my life is just too boring.

OK, I'll give you a great use of Dropbox for hackers: Let's say you use Mercurial instead of Subversion. If you have your Mercurial project in Dropbox, you have at your disposal the full source control functionality provided by Mercurial and automatic backups of your mercurial repository. Get it now?

I use it for my documents. Not everything can be google docs. I just finished up my taxes online, and printed the forms/reports as pdfs, which I saved into my ~/Documents folder, which is symlinked to dropbox.

Sharing files, and generally collaborating, with non-programmers.

I also use it as a secondary backup for particularly important files (in addition to my physical backups)- it's replaced the "email myself a copy of the important presentation" process.

i use it to sync catpics to my phone for mms'ing to girls. that's it. i'm serious.

some people use it to sync their 1password database.

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