Version Control With Dropbox
December 7th, 2009 by MattI’ve mentioned Dropbox before here, but I didn’t mention this neat trick you could do with it…
Anyone in the programming industry will recommend that you use version control software like SVN or Git to save yourself headaches when you make a mistake and need to roll back a file to a previous state. What if you used Dropbox for that? You get 2GB free, and files sync automatically without you having to do anything.
Dropbox has file versioning built in, actually. When you edit or delete files, Dropbox keeps prior versions in case you wish to restore them. With a couple of clicks you can overwrite the current version with an old.
While that’s great for basic applications, you could take things a step further and store a SVN repository in your Dropbox (with a local SVN server powering it). It would work fine for a single user, but it wouldn’t work well with more than one committer.
Gotta love Dropbox! Just noticed a cool integration the other day when uploading some pictures to Picasa. Right within the Picasa interface if you are viewing an image and right click on it you can upload straight to Dropbox.
That’s neat. It’s got to help Dropbox move their paid plans too, what with the file size of most photos.