Tag Archives: Dropbox

Using Symbolic Links to Backup Your Files to Dropbox

Feb 1, 2010 by Matt | Posted in Services and Tools 4 Comments

Dropbox is an excellent little service that I’ve written about on more than one occasion. It’s a nice off-site backup tool, as well as easy way to keep data synced between multiple computers.

I imagine it would be nice to get one of their larger plans and automagically sync all of your files between a desktop and a laptop, but not all of us are willing to pay for that luxury.

Now if you have a few assorted folders that you want to keep synced with Dropbox, what’s an easy way to do so without physically moving them into your main Dropbox folder? You can use the magic of symbolic links. (A magic that only exists on Mac OS X, Linux, and Unix…)

Open a command line and type the following two commands, changing the paths to whatever is relevant in your situation:

cd /Users/Matt/Dropbox
ln -s /Users/Matt/path/to/my/files The_New_Folder_Name

Now if you go back to your Dropbox folder, you should see a new directory called “The_New_Folder_Name” that, when clicked, should bounce you right over to the original folder. Dropbox will see this “shortcut” link as the real deal and back the files up to the cloud.

Version Control With Dropbox

Dec 7, 2009 by Matt | Posted in Services and Tools 5 Comments

I’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.

Dropbox revisions

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.

Dropbox: Easy File Synchronization

Nov 25, 2009 by Matt | Posted in Services and Tools 3 Comments

As long as people have worked with multiple computers, they’ve always had to find ways to transfer files between them. Back in the old days, we used square plastic things called “floppy diskettes” to store data and recall it on any convenient computer. They could hold an amazing 1.41 megabytes worth of files. Back when everything was plain text, that was workable.

Nowadays, people still use sneakernet, though the medium of choice is now USB flash drives and occasionally an external hard disk. But the idea remains the same: You have files you’re working on, and you want to access them on more than one computer; so you load the files onto a drive and bring them with you. Perhaps you want to take your work home, or you want to smuggle some music into your workplace or school. Maybe you’re writing a novel and you want to continue to write while you travel.

Meet Dropbox.

Dropbox Illustration

Dropbox does away with the need to manually copy files from place to place. All you have to do is tell the software which files it should sync, and those files are mirrored in “the cloud,” where any of your linked computers can access them. You can view documents on your iPhone/iPod, edit them on your laptop, or work with them on someone else’s computer.

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