Do you ever find yourself switching back and forth between your work computer, your laptop, and your home computer? This happens to me all the time when I'm writing. Rather than carry all your files on a USB stick and risk losing it or corrupting your data, give Dropbox a try. It's dead simple, and works for PC, Mac, and Linux too.
Once you sign up and install on all your computers, you'll have a special folder, where if you save something there on one computer, it is automatically created and stays synchronized in the same folder on all your other computers. What's more, if you use someone else's computer, you can access all your files through a web interface because they're all securely backed up online. I've been using this for a while now to sync all the papers I'm working on, RefMan/EndNote databases, config files, and R functions I reuse all the time. You can also create "public" folders. Put something here, and you can get a direct link to the file online to share with other folks. For example, here's a link to some R code I wrote to use ggplot2 to make manhattan plots and QQ-plots for every PLINK output file in the current directory (I'm hoping to clean this code up and include this with some other functions I've written into a package on CRAN soon).
I can't recommend this little app enough. If you're still not convinced, check out this short video that explains what Dropbox is all about and shows of just how simple it is to use.
You get a whopping 2GB for free, but if you use the registration link provided below, you'll get an extra free 1/4GB. Happy holidays from GGD, and I'll catch up with you all next week!
Dropbox - Secure online backup and synchronization
Getting Genetics Done by Stephen Turner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Once you start using Dropbox, check out this article from MaximumPC - 15 Hacks every Dropbox user should know - for some tips to add extra functionality to your Dropbox.
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