If you have been living under a rock, please do yourself a favor and go sign up for Dropbox (disclosure: clicking on that link will give me a referral benefit). The Dropbox homepage has a nice video explaining the features but the high level is that you get 4GB of free cloud storage that you can access across pretty much all of your devices.

I have two desktops at work, one at home, a HTPC, two laptops, a cell phone and an iPad. You might call it an excessive list of devices but I do make use of all of those. And it is important to be able to, say, edit a document on one machine and then pick up from where I left off on another. Dropbox enables me to do that.

Here’s a setup that I use that might be useful to you. I set the “My Dropbox” folder to some location on my desktop (that is not my C drive). Then I created folders such as Documents, Music, Photos, Videos, etc. underneath. Finally I set my Windows 7 Library folders to the corresponding folders under my dropbox folder. With this setup, all of my libraries in windows are synchronized. As soon as I copy in a file or modify another, the changes are reflected on all of my machines.

This mechanism, of course, works on any program that uses files to keep its state. As an example, I configure each of my MSN Messenger instances to store conversation history in a dropbox location so that they are all synchronized. I rely on this feature to view previous conversations (I frequently close windows).

As an added bonus, you can consume (manage and view) these files from your cell phone or iPad. Do give it a try.