Comments on: Back ups outside of Dropbox

By: Fabiano

Fabiano — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 22:52:41 +0000

Chuck, I’m sure you found out about this by now but here is a link where they talk about this issue in case someone else runs into it:
http://wiki.dropbox.com/TipsAndTricks/SyncOtherFolders

Quote:
“..if you put a symlink in your Dropbox folder that links to a single file, updates to the file sometimes cause the link to be replaced by a copy of the file itself, and the original ‘linked to’ file is not synchronized anymore. A safe solution seems to be to put only symlinks to folders in your Dropbox folder, or to put the original file into your Dropbox folder and then create symbolic links to your file at the other location(s) you want to access the file from.”

I think the best solution would be to symlink the folder instead as in
$ ln -s ~/Library/Safari/ ~/DropBox/SyncLink/
but then I am not sure you want everything in there to be synched.

By: Dave

Dave — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 16:56:10 +0000

Chuck, give Xmarks a try for the bookmark syncing. I use it to sync bookmarks across Safari, FireFox and IE (over Mac, Linux & PC). Free and works like a charm. Here's a tweet with my screenshot of just that.

By: ChuckEye

ChuckEye — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 16:49:42 +0000

The symbolic link works good for most standard docs. Unfortunately, it can be screwy for a few specialized cases. This weekend I tried to do “ln -s ~/Library/Safari/Bookmarks.plist ~/DropBox/SyncLink/Bookmarks.plist” after having made a copy to my DropBox… Now that I let my .mac expire, I was looking for a new way to sync my Safari Bookmarks, and since I’m not on more than one machine at a time, I thought this would be a good solution. Well launching Safari read the one from the DropBox on launch, but then overwrote the symbolic link with a new hard file in the Library.

No immediate workaround in mind, though not a pressing problem. Just thought I had a clever solution and it didn’t quite work.

By: Doug Aitken

Doug Aitken — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 15:10:17 +0000

Thanks for this David, I was just about to go to the Dropbox wiki to find this out, I thought it would be just the same as a norm sym link but wanted to check but came across this post first.
I recently blogged about the use of Dropbox in education, just an idea I had. I use Dropbox to back up my website code etc.

By: Dave

Dave — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 16:45:24 +0000

Thanks, Chris, glad you liked it. Sometimes the blogging spigot gets clogged…

By: Mojo Denbow

Mojo Denbow — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 16:18:53 +0000

Now why don’t you blog more often? Good stuff.

By: Dave

Dave — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 17:57:28 +0000

Hi Maryn, yes I used my referral code for DropBox so that anyone signing up through my link would get a little extra space for free. I get the same free space as well. Pretty nice. I went a little crazy with the Terminal hack last week and backed up all my development websites, important documents, etc. Hope it works for you.

By: Maryn McKenna

Maryn McKenna — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 17:29:57 +0000

Hey, Dave, I clicked through to DropBox from here and it awarded you (and me) some extra memory. Wasn’t expecting that, but there ya go. Doing my initial upload now… should have waited for an overnight, it is clogging my bandwidth. will try this Terminal hack as I don’t like having things live in the DropBox.

By: Dave

Dave — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 16:32:21 +0000

Thanks for the comment, Chuck. For me, DropBox has a few features that iDisk is lacking. Hard disk space is a big one. For the same price as MobileMe ($99/year for 20GB storage) you get 50GB with DropBox. But that's not what stands out to me. I LOVE the version control and ability to "restore" previous versions of a file if it is needed. It's basically Subversion for non-programmers (with a nice GUI interface). Thanks again for stopping by the blog.

By: ChuckEye

ChuckEye — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 15:06:18 +0000

I got a .mac account a year ago (before the transition to mobile me) and I’ve been debating whether or not to keep it. Address Book syncing was useful until I moved all my contacts to my Gmail address book, because Gmail syncs contacts & calendars with my Blackberry more seamlessly than MissingSync or PocketMac for Blackberry. I still like using iDisk for offline or on/offline storage… Keeping iDisk synced means there’s a local sparse disk of 20GB that pushes changes up to the cloud in the background… a function I might like if I also pick up a Dell Inspiron Mini9 netbook to run Leopard on. (Seems like a SSD system keeping your datafiles in sync with iDisk would be the way to go, since it wouldn’t be my primary machine but rather something used for note-taking and surfing…)

I may have to give DropBox a look to see if it meets any of those needs before my mobile me renews next month for another year.