Ministry Tech Tip: Using DropBox

Dropbox is a great resource for ministers. In ministry, it is often necessary to use several computers to perform your job. You may have a desktop computer in your office, a laptop at home, and a computer connected to the projector in the sanctuary. If you are like most people you will need to be able to access your documents on all of these. In the past, you had to tote around floppy disk, and later USB thumb drives in order to have access to the files that you readily need, all that has changed with the creation of Dropbox. Dropbox provides all users with a free 2GB of storage, additional free space is given upon completely certain task or referring others to the service. 2GB is more than enough for most of your routine document works, but if you need more space they do offer paid packages at a reasonable rate.

How it works….

To use Dropbox you must first sign up for an account here, I have included my referral link which will give both of us extra free space. Having signing up go through the Getting starting steps on dropbox.com, this will give you even more free space. You will need to install the Dropbox client on each of the computers you use. You may not want to use the same account on all computers, I will explain this in a moment. After the install is complete you will find a “My Dropbox” folder in you’re my Documents, anything placed in this folder will be synced between all of the other computers you have with your account.

Other Uses….

As I mentioned above, you may not want every file you put in your Dropbox to be placed on other computers, for instance the one you use for PowerPoint in the sancturary does not need to have your personal notes. To accomplish this you can create a separate Dropbox account for that computer, you may need to use a different email address, and you can setup a shared folder between the accounts to place the files you need in. All of this is explained in the Dropbox getting started tutorial.

I hope this helps you to work more efficiently without the hassle of copying files between different computers. If you have any questions feel free to post them in the comments.