If you haven't already, you should stop what you're doing and take 5 minutes to install Dropbox on your computer.  Use this referral link so you can earn an additional 250MB to the free 2 GB account, like 7 (UPDATE 8/19/2010: 10) of my friends who already have.

Now some background for the unconvinced: The Dropbox service makes USB Flash drives, floppy disks, and emailing documents to yourself pretty much obsolete, except for instances where you can't access the internet.

Ever work on a project where emailing different versions of a document among several collaborators is painful?  Google Docs provides a great solution for collaborating on simplistic spreadsheets and basic word processing files, but Dropbox is a better option for sharing the majority of folders and file types that need a full feature set like Microsoft Excel, Word, or PowerPoint.  The main restriction to this approach is one you are already used to dealing with: collaborators will need to work one at a time or have to merge their changes into a new version manually.

Since launching a beta over 2 years ago, Dropbox has automated backing files up for over 4 million users using a "Dropbox" folder on their computers.  Whenever a Dropbox user's computer is connected to the internet, the Dropbox folder backs up automatically to the cloud.

How could Dropbox make your life easier?  Even more important than the collaborative folder sharing described earlier could be the effortless way Dropbox backs up whatever important documents you store there: perhaps schoolwork from this term, a project for work, or pictures from this year that you haven't yet backed up on DVD or an external hard drive manually--even though you keep meaning to!

Additional uses I have found for Dropbox have included picture sharing, and the mobile experience on an iPhone and iPad (and Android, I believe) allows you to read PDFs or other documents on the go.  If you mark a file as a "Favorite" while you have an internet connection, you can even access it on your device when you are left without Wi-Fi or data.  Lastly, I once unexpectedly needed to email a file on my computer to a friend but was nowhere near my computer.  Luckily, I was able to access the file on my mobile phone via Dropbox and email an access link to that file to my friend within minutes.  Space age stuff!

While there are other similar services out there like SugarSync and Box.net, I have yet to find one that allows me to do so much, so easily, for so little: free.

Still reading?!?  I have slowly been researching less expensive options for larger-scale cloud storage options for when I run out of the 2GB+ that comes free with Dropbox.  Input welcome!

• Related Post: Why I love the Cloud and you will too
• UPDATE 8/19/2010, Related External Article: Reward the Passionates via @Vacanti
  

Computer information you want to access more than once has to be saved somewhere.  Contacts, pictures, emails, and word processing documents are some of the most basic types of data a internet user would want to save in different versions, access far out in the future, update regularly, or all three.

This is why I aim for a setup where I can throw my computer out the window and not lose any data at all.  My phone is currently set up this way--if it gets lost or stolen, all I need to do is connect a new one to my computer and all my contacts, calendars, and configurations will be set up as if I had never lost my phone at all.

So what is "the cloud" anyway?  Googling "cloud computing" yields many definitions but the basic idea is simply using the internet to store information, as opposed to using a physical location like a hard drive on your computer or a USB flash drive.

One main concern with storing information in the cloud is that by definition, you are putting information in someone else's hands.  One of my favorite examples is Gmail, Google's popular web-based email software.  Google stores all of its users information on their servers so that users can access all of their emails and contacts from different computers and mobile phones.

If Google started invading, distributing, or deleting personal user data, there would be a mass exodus of users faster than you can say "goodbye Google," creating what I believe is a natural incentive to protect user data.

• Related Follow-Up Post: Stop, Drop(and)box