I was pleasantly surprised this morning when Dropbox greeted me with a notice that my free space has increased to 18,4 GB. I have looked at their website and found a blog post about it. For every friend you refer, you get not 250 MB as before, but 500 MB (which can make you max 16 GB). The good news is that you get this for old friends as well, not only for the new ones you refer. So if you already got all the free space, there’s nothing you have to do – your referral space will double automatically.

If you’re not signed up for Dropbox yet, you can do that by using my referral link that will both get us additional 500 MB free storage compared to the direct sign up on Dropbox web site.

This increase of free space is not a coincidence. As you might know, Google is preparing a similar syncing service that will probably be called Google Drive. Some screen shots of the feature have already leaked, but there is still no info on when the service will be available. For sure, it will be a big competition to Dropbox, Sugarsync and also Microsofts’ Sky Drive. There are many Googles users and Google Drive will be integrated to Google Docs and maybe to other services like Picasa, too – which is something Dropbox can’t do.

Google Drive is supposed to bring 5 GB of free space which is the same as Dropbox does. If you don’t count the 16 GB you can get by referring friends, of course.