A Rockin’ App and A Missing App

Been mean­ing to put my admi­ra­tion and frus­tra­tions down in writ­ing for some time.  Right now seems as good a time as any (yup, you guessed it, I’m avoid­ing housework).

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First, the rockin’ appli­ca­tion:  Drop­box.  Darned if this thing isn’t just the handiest!

Here’s the con­cept:  Sign up, install appli­ca­tion on computer(s), and get 2GB of free online stor­age space for sync­ing and/or file sharing.

I first heard about drop­box on a mes­sage board for Reunion 9 soft­ware users.  A com­mon sce­nario for seri­ous geneal­o­gists is that of main­tain­ing the fam­ily tree and doc­u­men­ta­tion on their desk­top but using their lap­tops dur­ing research for­ays.  I’m not a seri­ous geneal­o­gist (yet) but I’ve long been search­ing for a good, reli­able method of shar­ing and sync­ing files between mul­ti­ple computers.

Rarely have I ever encoun­tered a solu­tion so per­fectly suited to my needs.  Usu­ally it’s a mat­ter of find­ing some­thing close and using vir­tual twine, duct-tape, and a lit­tle used chew­ing gum to make it fit my pur­poses.  But thus far with Drop­box the twine, tape, and gum have stayed in my vir­tual tool box.

Here’s how it works:  after you down­load and install the pro­gram, a folder is cre­ated called Drop­box.  Now, doc­u­ments that you want acces­si­ble for sync­ing or shar­ing are saved in the Drop­box folder instead of your Doc­u­ments folder.  At this point, every sin­gle time a com­puter run­ning Drop­box is con­nected to the inter­net, Drop­box will com­pare your online account with the account on your com­puter and auto­mat­i­cally sync all doc­u­ments.  If that doesn’t make sense, check out their tour.

I use Drop­box to keep my File­maker Pro data­base files synced between my Mac­Book and my iMac.  It’s a beau­ti­ful thing.  Let’s say I spend a cou­ple of hours in the base­ment on my iMac, list­ing inven­tory in my store and edit­ing pho­tos.  I’ve got my File­maker Pro data­base open and I’m work­ing like a fiend.  Then sud­denly it’s time to go to my One­ToOne les­son.  I close the file and imme­di­ately I see the lit­tle Drop­box icon change.  In a cou­ple of sec­onds the good-to-go icon with a green check mark comes back on.  Now I know that everything’s duckie, I throw myself together, throw the Mac­Book in it’s case, and run out the door.  At the Apple store, I pop open the lap­top and after giv­ing it a cou­ple of sec­onds, open up my Drop­box and there it is, my up-to-date inven­tory data­base all ready for my next File­maker Pro lesson.

But not only has Drop­box proved itself to be irre­placa­bly con­ve­nient, it’s also saved my butt more than once.  If I recall cor­rectly, I’ve needed to roll-back my doc­u­ment to an older ver­sion of my file no less than three times.  Any­one famil­iar with Apple will be famil­iar with the Time Machine con­cept.  Drop­box works on the same prin­ci­ple — every time it syncs a saved file, instead of over­writ­ing it saves the file as a new ver­sion.  So if I start exper­i­ment­ing with my data­base with­out first cre­at­ing a backup (some­thing I’m prone to doing) and I cre­ate a mess (some­thing else I’m prone to doing) I can log into my Drop­box account online and roll back to an older version.

Like I said, it’s a beau­ti­ful thing.

But at this point you’re think­ing, here I read this whole spiel but I’m a Win­dows (or Linux) junkie.  Well don’t despair.  These Drop­box peo­ple are shar­ing the love — it works on XP and Vista as well as sev­eral Linux sys­tems (Ubuntu, for exam­ple) as well as iPhones and the iTouch.

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Now my miss­ing appli­ca­tion lament.  YNAB, oh, YNAB — where­fore art thou YNAB?

Or, more specif­i­cally, their promised YNAB 3, an upgraded ver­sion that will be Mac compatible.

There isn’t a sin­gle day goes by that I don’t miss, dare I say ache, for the com­fort­ing in-control feel­ing I had for the 13 or so months that I used my You Need a Bud­get pro­gram on nearly a daily basis.  I want that bud­get­ing con­trol back!  Desperately!

The only — and I mean only — thing I regret about switch­ing from PC to Mac is loos­ing the abil­ity to use YNAB.  I’d thought maybe I’d be dis­ci­plined enough to keep up with my bud­get on an old spare PC but the just after I made the switch I ended up los­ing all of my bud­get data to a hard drive fail­ure (sure wish I’d been using Drop­box back then!).  I couldn’t bear the thought of rebuild­ing 13+ months of data on an old PC and, hon­estly, I thought the release of YNAB 3 was vir­tu­ally around the corner.

Ugh.  It’s almost embar­rass­ing how much I’m Jonesing for daily bud­get­ing.  So my mes­sage to you Jesse: please, please, please, pretty please with sugar on top, pick up the pace.  Oh, and pick me as a beta tester!

[Dis­claimer:  I am not a Drop­box affil­i­ate but I might ben­e­fit from refer­rals by earn­ing extra stor­age space.  I am a YNAB affil­i­ate.  How­ever, none of my opin­ions are any­thing other than heart-felt.  Endorse­ments of prod­ucts are always my hon­est, unpur­chased, non-financially-motivated opinions.]

Related posts:

1. YNAB3 & Groceries
2. Food
3. Some­thing Extra to be Thank­ful For
4. The Dis­ap­peared Reappear
5. Octo­ber Bud­get Overview