How Dropbox Worksĭropbox’s promise to let you access your files wherever you are, and on whatever device you are using, is a hugely compelling selling point and it is all made possible thanks to the power of cloud computing.Īccessing Dropbox is done in a couple of ways. Just add the code Comparitech15 at checkout. The folks at SpiderOak are offering our readers a 15% discount here. TIP: If you want a more secure alternative to Dropbox we recommend Spideroak. To help us understand how secure Dropbox’s service is, let’s first look at how the service operates. With such a huge trove of data, security and privacy are obviously very important for the company and its users. Some of the numbers associated with Dropbox are staggering, giving an idea of the amount of data the company stores - and is responsible for keeping safe: 35 billion Microsoft Office files are stored on Dropbox it supports 20 different languages and 4,000 file edits are made on Dropbox every single second.

Unsurprisingly it was a huge success, and almost a decade after it first launched Dropbox now has over half a billion users globally with 1.2 billion files uploaded to the service every single day by individuals as well as enterprise customers. Users can share files with others and the whole service was free - at least for those without the need to store a huge amount of data. In Houston’s case, while he was a student at MIT, he found he consistently forgot the USB key containing his files on it and the file sharing services which were available in 2007 simply didn’t meet his needs, with problems like latency, buggy software and inability to handle big files among his major gripes.Īnd so Houston created Dropbox, a simple service which allows users to store files online while also syncing their files to folders on their PCs, laptops and smartphones. Like most internet services, Dropbox was created because its founder - Drew Houston - couldn’t find a solution to a problem which satisfied his needs.

Dropbox security white paper