More Dropbox Benefits

Our integration with Dropbox has proven to be a very popular feature. More than 90% of our customers use Dropbox to have their Basecamp files, writeboards and data delivered to them. There are plenty of reasons for this from a customer perspective: Dropbox is drop dead simple to use and it makes getting your Basecamp backup just as simple. They provide syncing between all of your devices as well as online backup of them all so you will have multiple copies of all your Basecamp information. All of your data and files stored online in Dropbox are encrypted which addresses many of the potential security threats. With our latest release Basecamp backups are also versioned using Dropbox’s versioning system, so if the backup engine pulls the same file multiple times from your Basecamp account across different backups that file will be versioned in Dropbox.

There’s one other cool feature that Dropbox provides that many FTP servers do not: Internationalization. For many of our customers, English isn’t their first language, nor is it the language that they work in with their customers. This means that they are naming files and data in different languages and, many what that does is forces applications like Centripetal Retrieve to use UTF8 character sets to handle those file names. The problem comes when we try to store those file names to FTP servers that do not support UTF8 (which surprisingly many don’t). What you end up with is a bunch of gibberish for the file name, and it is unreadable in any language. Dropbox fully supports all of the international character sets that we test with and so our customers that use Dropbox to receive their Basecamp backups are ensured to have their file names stored correctly. For FTP there are no issues with the content of the files, only with the file names because the FTP server never attempts to do any conversion on the file contents only on the name of the file.