Update Dropbox and track downloads

There are lots of online services providing free storage space if you look around, but my favourite is Dropbox. This is mainly because it runs on everything and just works. I'm not bothered about fancy features and just need to get my work done.

Dropbox 2.0 has just been released and you may be wondering what version you currently have and how you upgrade. Find the current version depends on what you are running it on. In Windows for example, just let the mouse hover over the icon in the taskbar. A tooltip box pops up with the version number. On other systems, click the icon and go to preferences. It'll say the version number on one of the tabs.

If you aren't running the latest version you have two options. One is to do nothing. Dropbox automatically updates itself to the latest version. However, this does not happen straight away and users are upgraded over a period of a couple of weeks. You may be the first to be upgraded or you could be the last and it's just luck. The other option is to download the latest version and install it, overwriting the current version with the new one.

Dropbox is useful not only for syncing files between different computers, but also for sharing files. Instead of emailing a large file you can simply send someone a link and they can download it. It is more convenient for both of you. You just right click a file and use the Share Link option on the Dropbox menu. If you send someone a file in this way, how do you know whether the person has downloaded it? If you make a file public by sharing the link, how do you know know many times it has been downloaded?

One option is to use a link shortening service like Bitly. Sign up for a free account at Bitly. Then get the share link for the file from Dropbox and us Bitly to shorten it. Shortening it is not important and what makes this useful is that Bitly tracks the number of clicks on shortened links. So you can see whether someone you emailed a link to has downloaded it, or if you have made a link public, how many times people have clicked it. This isn't perfect, but it can be useful on occasions.