15 Hacks Every Dropbox User Should Know

Posted 12/09/2009 at 10:00am | by Alex Castle and Norman Chan

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Use Dropbox to manage BitTorrent

How often have you found yourself sitting at work, only to find out that a file you’re interested (a demo for a game you’re excited about, for instance) has just become available online. Sure, you could sit there patiently, and wait until you get home to download it; but why bother waiting when you could have it ready for you as soon as you get there. Most of the big BitTorrent clients have some sort of web-based control, but those can be tricky to set up, and require that you have a static IP (or set up a DynDNS account). Using DropBox, it’s much easier.

Here’s what you’ll need to do: First, make sure you have a BitTorrent client capable of automatically loading .torrent files from a folder. All the big ones are capable of this, including uTorrent, Vuze, and the standard BitTorrent client. Next, set it up to monitor your DropBox, or a folder in your DropBox (My Documents/My Dropbox/Torrents for instance) and automatically open any .torrent file added to that folder.

Now, if you see a file you want to grab, just download the .torrent file to your Dropbox/Torrents folder, and your home PC will start the download as soon as DropBox syncs. It’s as simple as that.

Of course, this method requires that you leave you computer on all day long, a decidedly environmentally-unfriendly practice that we don't recommend. But If you're anticipating the need to download something (a beta test for a new MMO, maybe?) we won't fault you for making a one-day exception.

Use Portable Dropbox to keep your data mobile

Making Dropbox into a portable app (that is, an app that can be installed on a USB thumb drive) might at first seem redundant—isn’t Dropbox meant to replace thumb drives, after all? But if you stop to think about it, there are ways in which Dropbox and USB drives can be used together. For instance, consider the following situation:

You’ve got to give a PowerPoint presentation, and you’ll be using somebody else’s laptop, which is connected to a projector. You could copy the .ppt file over to a USB key, but why bother? All your project files are already sitting on a USB key connected to your computer, running portable Dropbox. You snag the key and head out the door. On the way, your boss calls and tells you that there’s a big mistake in the presentation, but you don’t sweat it: your boss saves a correct version, and when you get to the presentation you run Dropbox and the file updates in a flash.

So how do you actually run portable Dropbox? It’s pretty easy, just follow these steps:

1.    Download Portable Dropbox. The Dropbox forums page for the project is here, although as of 12/7/09, the latest version seems to be broken, and you’ll need to grab the fixed version here.
2.    Unzip the file you downloaded, and drop the contents (the DropBox folder) onto your thumbdrive.
3.    Run the DropboxPortable executable, and follow the instructions in the installer.

Host a website on Dropbox

Now here’s an unusual use for Dropbox. Did you know that you can actually host a website, using Dropbox’s “Public” folder? It’s easy, you just drop in html files and images into your public folder, the way you would normally upload those files onto an FTP server.

Interlinking works fine, as does client-side scripting. Obviously, any server side stuff won’t work, but this is a great way to quickly host a smaller page. You can simply build the site as you like, viewing it locally, and when you’re satisfied, it’s already on the web!

We haven’t heard any specific information about bandwidth caps on Dropbox’s public share, but it’s safe to say that that it’s probably not meant to be used for mass data transfer. In other words, If you want to host something bigger than a personal site or blog, you’re still better off with traditional hosting.