How to Monitor Your Computer From Different Location with Dropbox

There are limitless things which can be done using Dropbox. Few things which we have seen are Multiple Dropbox account on single PC, Downl0ad email attachment directly to Dropbox and recover deleted Dropbox files.

Usually monitoring a computer can be done by various software tools. Apart from that one unique way to monitor but not remote access your home computer or office computer is using the Dropbox. Yes, it requires Dropbox to complete the task of monitoring without purchasing the paid software.

Now this remote monitoring is useful in the following examples –

• To confirm that no one is using your office work PC while you are sleeping at home.
• Your kids are using your home PC when you are out and you are eager to know what they are doing on your PC in your absence.
• Your are running task on your PC and wants to track the progress of it at selected time intervals.

Dropbox as a Tool for Remote Monitoring

You might be thinking how this is possible, but its possible in fairly simple way. Since you know the properties of Dropbox that you can get access of your cloud stored files using the online Dropbox interface any time, it uses the same concept.

Here is the procedure to do it -

• First you need a free image capturing utility which will save the screenshots directly into your Dropbox folder. The softwares like SnagIt can perform this task for you provided you save the files in a Dropbox folder. One utility which we recommend to use is the Screen Grabber.
• So download Screen Grabber from here.
• Install it on your PC.
• Now go to its Settings and make sure that you have selected Screenshot save location a folder in your Dropbox.
  You can set Image format as JPEG to capture images as PNG occupies a large space.

• The next thing we need to have a screen capture at regular intervals. For that you need to have an AutoHotkey script which will run in the background and will press the hotkey for a predefined internal. We have made this autohotkey script ready for you to download (dropbox-capture.zip).
• Do this for any desktop that you want to monitor remotely and you will get the screenshot saved in your Dropbox folder. Now that you browse them on Dropbox online interface from anywhere and thus know what has happened. These files are available at Dropbox folder specified by you in the setting of Screen Grabber.

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