I recently discovered a file sharing program which makes it easy to share your family history research data with others.

It’s called Dropbox.

Dropbox is software that syncs your files online and across your computers.  Put your files into your Dropbox on one computer, and they will quickly become available on any of your other computers that have the Dropbox software installed.

Dropbox is cross-platform compatible; you can even store your documents on a Windows system and Dropbox will copy them to other systems where you can use them with native Macintosh, Linux, and Windows applications.

Dropbox also lets you share files easily. You simply put the folders you want to share in your Dropbox, and invite people to them.  The process is safe and secure; shared access is always under your direct control.  Nobody can access your files unless you give them permission to do so.  This makes Dropbox perfect for collaboration on family history research projects.

Dropbox is very secure.  All transmission of file data occurs over an encrypted channel (SSL).  All files stored on Dropbox servers are encrypted (AES-256) and are inaccessible without your account password.  Not even the Dropbox employees can decode your files unless you invite them.

Even better, Dropbox lets you go back in time to undelete or undo changes to files.  When you make a change to a file, Dropbox syncs both versions of the file but saves them as separate files (it actually saves the first version in its entirety and then saves just the changes of the later versions).  Dropbox keeps a history of every change made so that you can undo any mistakes and even undelete files for up to 30 days.  If you find an error in one of the later versions of your file, you can retrieve any earlier version of the file at any time, as long as that earlier version is no more than 30 days old.

Best of all the software and the service is free of charge for a 2GB plan.  There is a fee if you need more than that.

To learn more and to download Dropbox, please visit the web site:  www.dropbox.com