I imagine it would be nice to get one of their larger plans and automagically sync all of your files between a desktop and a laptop, but not all of us are willing to pay for that luxury.

Now if you have a few assorted folders that you want to keep synced with Dropbox, what’s an easy way to do so without physically moving them into your main Dropbox folder? You can use the magic of symbolic links. (A magic that only exists on Mac OS X, Linux, and Unix…)

Open a command line and type the following two commands, changing the paths to whatever is relevant in your situation:

cd /Users/Matt/Dropbox
ln -s /Users/Matt/path/to/my/files The_New_Folder_Name

Now if you go back to your Dropbox folder, you should see a new directory called “The_New_Folder_Name” that, when clicked, should bounce you right over to the original folder. Dropbox will see this “shortcut” link as the real deal and back the files up to the cloud.

Anyone in the programming industry will recommend that you use version control software like SVN or Git to save yourself headaches when you make a mistake and need to roll back a file to a previous state. What if you used Dropbox for that? You get 2GB free, and files sync automatically without you having to do anything.

Dropbox has file versioning built in, actually. When you edit or delete files, Dropbox keeps prior versions in case you wish to restore them. With a couple of clicks you can overwrite the current version with an old.

While that’s great for basic applications, you could take things a step further and store a SVN repository in your Dropbox (with a local SVN server powering it). It would work fine for a single user, but it wouldn’t work well with more than one committer.

Nowadays, people still use sneakernet, though the medium of choice is now USB flash drives and occasionally an external hard disk. But the idea remains the same: You have files you’re working on, and you want to access them on more than one computer; so you load the files onto a drive and bring them with you. Perhaps you want to take your work home, or you want to smuggle some music into your workplace or school. Maybe you’re writing a novel and you want to continue to write while you travel.

Meet Dropbox.

Dropbox does away with the need to manually copy files from place to place. All you have to do is tell the software which files it should sync, and those files are mirrored in “the cloud,” where any of your linked computers can access them. You can view documents on your iPhone/iPod, edit them on your laptop, or work with them on someone else’s computer.

It’s really cool. If you put active projects into your Dropbox, you no longer have to worry about which computer the files are on. They’re on the computer you’re using. They’re everywhere.

Need to share a file with someone? Don’t email it to them, put it in your Public folder or mark it as shared, and send the link along.

The Dropbox software runs on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. There is also a web interface to access your files in situations where you cannot install the sync software. The service is free, so long as you have less than 2GB worth of synced files. Otherwise you’ll have to look into their paid plans.

Take a look, you won’t regret it. (Also, if you sign up with this affiliate link, we both get an extra 250MB of storage. How cool is that?)