As with Google’s imple­men­ta­tion, Dropbox’s two-​​factor authen­ti­ca­tion relies on two sep­a­rate ele­ments: some­thing you know (a pass­word) and some­thing you have (in this case, a sep­a­rately gen­er­ated code). While the com­bi­na­tion of these two ele­ments doesn’t guar­an­tee your secu­rity, it does make it much harder for a poten­tial hacker to gain access to your account.

Smart way to make your Drop­box more secure. I use the free Google Authen­ti­ca­tor app for iPhone already for my Google account, so this is easy to set up.

If you’re not already using Drop­box to backup and share your doc­u­ments, sign up here and we’ll both get extra stor­age space.

Update: Some rec­om­men­da­tions for users of 1Password to not use this ver­sion of Drop­box (yet) from 1Password:

The bot­tom line is that I am strongly rec­om­mend­ing that 1Password users not be early adopters of this. Early adopters should:

• under­stand the data secu­rity gains and risks thor­oughly (dis­cussed below)
• take steps to reduce those risks (have great back­ups), and
• be very com­fort­able using pre-​​release systems