The main view is a list of recent events that will show which files have been added and removed. The Dropbox web interface is minimalist, but it has a few really useful features. This URL can be obtained through the Dropbox web interface or can be pushed directly to the clipboard by selecting the "Copy public link" item from the Dropbox right-click context menu. Files that are placed in a user's Public folder can be accessed by other people who are given the public URL. In addition to serving as a synchronization tool, Dropbox can also be used as a quick and easy way to share files with other people. The web service then propagates those changes to all other computers on which the user is running the Dropbox software. It detects when files are modified on the local filesystem and will immediately upload the changes. The Dropbox client software will automatically keep files synchronized between multiple computers and the user's Dropbox web storage space. Hands on with Dropboxĭropbox is a cloud storage service with really smooth native platform integration on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. I began pursuing the path to computing zen by hotboxing my home office dropboxing my files. During my futile struggle to get that hack into a usable condition, Ars Linux community member Whiprush saved me from myself and introduced me to Dropbox, a turnkey synchronization solution that gave me almost everything I wanted. I started writing a wacky Python script that would use inotify to detect filesystem changes and automatically perform synchronization under certain conditions. I decided to scale back and try rsync, but it still wasn't transparent enough for my liking. Real men use distributed version control systems for everything, right? It was unnecessarily excessive and got cumbersome quickly. The sweet penguin juice roaring through my veins commanded me to adopt a needlessly arcane solution, so I started putting all of my article drafts into a private Bazaar repository on my personal web server. I had to augment this approach by using synchronization tools for critical files so that I still have access to important data when the tubes are clogged. It's a very seamless solution that works great when I have decent Internet connectivity, but it falls flat on its face when I can't connect or when my connection is unreliable. My approach is to store everything on my 4TB home NAS, which I can mount on my laptop via sshfs for secure remote access. Needlessly arcane solutionsĪs a Linux user, I have some pretty nice tools baked into the OS to help me get the job done. But I didn't discover it until I had tried everything else first. As you can see by looking at the comments that some of you posted in response to Jon's synchronization conundrum, many of us roll our own imperfect solutions and yearn for something better.įor me, that "something better" has arrived in the form of Dropbox, a cross-platform sync tool. His description of the challenges of syncing and saving resonated with many of us on the Ars staff and with quite a few readers, too. A few months ago, our own Jon Stokes bemoaned the frustration of managing and accessing data strewn across a multitude of personal computing devices.
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