Dropbox is similar to Apple’s iDisk, in the respect that it is an online backup/data storage facility. The only difference is, dropbox will give you 2GB of free storage, just for signing up. There’s also an option to pay either $9.99 per month, or $99 per year, which will upgrade your storage capacity to 50GB. For me personally, I don’t (yet) need any more than the 2GB, though I may consider looking into the 50GB option in future.

What I like most about Dropbox is that it’s cross platform. For me this is fantastic, because I run Ubuntu (9.04 64 bit if you’re interested) on my desktop, and my laptop is an aluminum Macbook. Now I had the problem of somehow remembering to put things in the Dropbox directory so that they would get synced to the server and thus between my 2 machines.

Solving that problem was a lot easier than I could’ve expected. No thanks to my friend Gabby, who told me what he had done on IRC. Using

you can create soft links to the directories to/from the Dropbox directory, and any changes you make to that directory outside of the Dropbox directory, get automatically synced. Put simply, if I make any changes to something in ~/Documents, it automatically gets backed up/synced to Dropbox. Awesome!!

If you’re unsure of the syntax of

, as it is a little confusing, it’s the following:

And finally, if you want to join Dropbox because you haven’t already, following this link will (according to Dropbox) get you a little bit more space

Edit: I’ve just been informed (thanks Matteo!) that the referral links don’t seem to be giving extra space any more. This is likely because Dropbox limits the amount they give out. Please feel free to use the link at the end of the post if you want, but don’t feel obliged to if you do want to sign up. Join Dropbox

So Ubuntu 8.10 was released to day – as always, downloads were slow, websites went down, torrents were seeded, the usual (yes the forums went down too – in fact they’ve just come back online ).

I’ve in the middle of installing Intrepid on my laptop as I write this, so far it looks nice, not to different visually from Hardy when you first boot the live CD, but there are some differences that I think are noticeable when you finally get around to using them.

Anyway, I’ve got stuff to be doing and /home directories to be restoring, so I’ll post back in a few days when I’ve been running Intrepid properly!!

A few links you may find useful:

http://releases.ubuntu.com/releases/8.10/
http://www.ubuntu.com/
http://ubuntuforums.org