Top 10 Personal Technology Influences - #1 Cloud Data & Dropbox

Technology changes rapidly. One of the best things about living in the Information Age is being able to experience the drastic historic changes at a staggering rate. Sometimes it feels like we see new leaps forward on a daily basis. I used to think that the most incredible rapid advance in any one area of technology was the 66-year span between the Wright Brothers historic flight at Kitty Hawk in late 1903 to Neil Armstrong’s “one small step” on the moon in mid 1969. But the advances made in information technology between the 1946 creation of the Eniac to today, 67 years later are at least equally incredible. And the meteoric rates of progress since the introduction of the microcomputer in the mid 1970s (a 35-40 year span) is staggering.

Fast forward to 2013. Recently I realized how different certain aspects of my life seem today than they did just 5 years ago. A rapid evolution in personal technology has changed the way I live, work and play. This is the first in a 10-part series of articles listing specific technologies that are affecting my life daily, that are making my life easier and more connected to the world around me.

Technology Influence #1: Cloud Data & Dropbox

Many applications now provide the ability to store your application-specific data on their servers in the cloud. You don’t know or care where or how the data is stored, you simply know it will be available to you when you are logged into the application, no matter where you log in from. Install the application on a new machine? Your data is there. Need to access your account from someone else’s computer? Your data is there. Backup and recovery? Not your problem (unless you want it to be).

Data accessible from anywhere is a real game changer as we move deeper into the information age. I no longer need to worry about what device I have or where I may have stored something. Examples of applications I use regularly that provide cloud-based data storage on their servers include Evernote (notebook), Omnifocus (task manager), Paprika (recipe manager), GroceryIQ (grocery list manager), and Junecloud Deliveries (shipping tracker).

Dropbox is a special case of the cloud data model and, in my opinion, a “killer app” in this realm. Dropbox provides a cloud file storage model that is synchronized to a directory tree on your local file system. Create or change a file on your local file system, and it is dynamically uploaded to the Dropbox cloud and then pushed back down to all other devices that are synchronized with your Dropbox account. Dropbox is ubiquitous with clients available on the web, iOS, OS X, Windows, Linux, Android, Blackberry and others.

A top feature of Dropbox is that if you’re offline (e.g., on an airplane without WiFi access), you still operate on your local files in a normal fashion and when you are reconnected to the Internet, Dropbox will synchronize your updated files without any further actions from you. A file tree that automatically goes everywhere with you, no matter what device you use.

Yes, there are competitive products to Dropbox such as Google Drive and Microsoft SkyDrive but as of this writing, Dropbox is still the one for me due in no small part to its simplicity and the number of mobile applications directly supporting Dropbox synching. It was the original model that set the standard for all the "big boys" to follow.

Next: Influence #2 - Cross-platform Applications.

Image credit: flashdevelop / 123RF Stock Photo