Download Files Directly to Dropbox with Ballloon

It’s way too easy to fill up your computer’s storage, especially if you have an SSD. My MacBook Air does good to have more than 15Gb of free space at any given time. Thus, I’m careful with what I store locally, offload most of my pictures and movies to external drives, and selectively sync Dropbox folders to let me store files online, but not have them take up space on my Mac (that’s Dropbox’ best secret, by the way: open your Dropbox app preferences, select Account, then click the Change Settings… button beside Selective Sync. Unselect the folders you don’t want on your Mac, and voila: they’ll stay in the cloud a click away, but won’t take up local storage).

Selective sync is a small patch to one of the broader things that cloud storage doesn’t do right—devices come with terribly small amounts of local storage today, but then say they also have cloud storage. And yet, that does you precious little good if said cloud storage takes up as much local space as it does in the cloud. We need something better—but for now, at least there’s that option.

Except the only problem is, adding files to those selectively synced folders is a pain. You’ve got to upload them through your browser, or add them to another folder then go online and move them.

Now, there’s a simple Chrome add-on that lets you download files directly to a Google Drive or Dropbox folder of your choice: Ballloon. Find a file online you want to download—that image for a project, or an eBook you just bought and need to sync with Dropbox to get it on your phone, or whatever—right-click on it, and select the Ballloon option, and it’ll download it directly to your online storage.

That’s handy for the use-case I mentioned previously, but could be a serious usability improvement on a Chromebook, which lacks traditional file management anyhow, and could be the perfect extra for your work computer so you can “download” files and have them automatically show up in your personal Dropbox on your computer back home. And it’s fast—no more waiting for downloads to finish, as Ballloon takes care of it in the background and saves your files online.

So hey. If you’ve ever wanted to download files directly to the cloud—that is, save them to your online storage without downloading them to your computer—Ballloon is the Chrome add-on for you. Enjoy.

Thoughts? @reply me on Twitter.