I have three office locations, four if you include my home office, and it’s quite common for me to find myself working on the same files in multiple locations on any given day. I’m not a fan of lugging around my laptop everywhere, so until recently, I would carry around a two-gigabyte USB drive and keep my current files on it. It worked great except for the times I would forget to bring it with me, misplace the drive, or accidentally drop it down a sewer. Hey, it happens.

However, the days of losing files to the Chicago Streets and Sanitation crews are over, thanks to Dropbox. Dropbox offers two gigabytes of free cloud storage. Once you install Dropbox, any file that you add to your Dropbox folder will automatically be synced and available on any other computer you have installed Dropbox on. There’s no need to e-mail yourself a file again. Just have Dropbox sitting on your desktop like any other folder and drag and drop the file you’ll need at another workstation. That’s it. You’ll have it when you need it.

Now what happens if you are on a computer without Dropbox installed? No worries, since its cloud storage, everything is available on the Web. Just log on to the Dropbox site to have access to all of your files.

Dropbox also includes a public folder that opens up some of your cloud storage for easy sharing. Put a file that you want to share in your Dropbox public folder, right click, select Dropbox, and then click “Copy public Link.”

Now you have a URL link in your clipboard that you can paste into an e-mail or IM conversation in order to share the file with others.

That’s just a bit of the functionality of Dropbox. I can’t recommend it enough. So retire your USB drive and come play in the clouds with me.