Over the past year I've been delighted with Dropbox and have blogged about it several times before. I now keep all my working files in the Dropbox folder on my desktop and find everything is synchronised within seconds to my other Macs (and even to my iPhone). Today, though, I had good reason to be grateful to Dropbox's archiving system where deleted files can be accessed and restored.
During the afternoon I had been working on my Moneydance accounts system and had reconciled several bank and credit-card statements in addition to a number of other adjustments. I got distracted, left the computer and forgot the file was still open. Later, I had a query on one of the reconciliations and opened the datafile on my MacBook Air. I still don't understand what happened, but I had opened a previous version, pre-dating all the work I had done in the afternoon. This older file then overwrote the newer file on Dropbox and I was faced with losing all the work I had done.
All was not lost, thanks to Dropbox. I was able to restore the older file and was soon back with the up-to-date data. Of course, this is also what Time Machine is for, but the big difference is that Dropbox is present on all my computers and my iPhone. If I discover a problem I can restore from any of these computers, even when away from home and away from the Time Machine backups.