Dropbox

I have suffered because of this, and I want to tell you why.

Dropbox was made possible because of the Cloud, and it cannot be understood unless the Cloud is understood first. Wikipedia says:

Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage and computing power, without direct active management by the user. The term is generally used to describe data centers available to many users over the Internet.

Dropbox (which is free) makes the cheap storage in the Cloud available to smaller users. 

Before we go into the details of how it can do this, we have to answer the question "Why does it want to do this?"

And the answer is "To make money for itself!" 

The Railroads did the same thing: the difference between what their service cost them, and what the user paid, went into their pockets. This was Capitalism: you paid money to make money. And this made everyone happy. 

Dropbox makes this easy for its users, but it could not make this perfectly easy. I will explain why. 

The Computer runs on Information. we have an Information Economy. Another word for Information is Data. And the presence of Big Computers makes Big Data possible - and profitable. 

That was a long statement, and I will shorten it to "Data is worth money!" And that is why Dropbox

is in business, To make money out of all the data people store in it. It can do this while protecting your privacy (it claims).

This a big claim, the same claim every cloud maker makes, and it is probably accurate. But you should be aware that they are using your data. You have to trust them to do the right thing with it.

If someone else wants to know what everyone else is doing on the Web, all they have to do is ask services such as Dropbox. Facebook also makes money this way - lots of money. 

We can now answer the questions "What is Dropbox? What can it do for me?" I will not go into any privacy questions.

Dropbox provides boxes that you can put your data in, In computers, data is contained in files. And this is what you put in your boxes.

You get a box for each of your devices  - a Laptop and a Phone, for example. And a box on their cloud.

You can get another box anywhere you want it, even in another country, as long as it has good Internet connections.

All of these boxes will contain the same data. Dropbox keeps track of all this data (using the Internet) and makes sure they are the same. You still with me?

On a laptop, you get a dropbox icon on your toolbar (on the bottom of the screen) you can click on, to get a handy window that displays all your files and information about each one.

Each time I add a photo to my Laptop, this also gets copied to my Dropbox. I have a folder there containing all my photos and videos.

As you can see, all this adds up to a lot of data, exactly what Dropbox wants. And for this reason, it makes it hard for you to delete data.

In case you missed the point, I will repeat it - Dropbox wants your data, and the more of it the better. In return, it gives you more data space. and helps you manage it.