Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Is DropBox a usefull tool?

hmm.... In a word, yes! I feel like I am a little late to this party but what a productivity booster DropBox can be. The greatest thing about Dropbox is that it acts like a folder on your drive and everything you put in there gets synced. Now you might not think that is so great since you would have to store all your configuration files in some random folder but all you really have to do is move your important files to the sync folder and then create a symbolic link to them from the original location. Pretty darn simple and very effective. Now I can have one .vimrc file, one plugin directory, one .alias file and all my different machines can use it!

Here is a snippet from my notes that shows you how simple this really is:

SYNCING MY FILES VIA THE CLOUD (DROPBOX)
Once dropbox is installed I ran these commands on my myth box and things were backedup and synced
mv hlp Dropbox/HOME
ln -s ~/Dropbox/HOME/hlp/ hlp
mv bin Dropbox/HOME
ln -s ~/Dropbox/HOME/bin/ bin
mv web Dropbox/HOME
ln -s ~/Dropbox/HOME/web/ web
mv .vimrc Dropbox/HOME
ln -s ~/Dropbox/HOME/.vimrc/ .vimrc
mv .tcshrc Dropbox/HOME
ln -s ~/Dropbox/HOME/.tcshrc/ .tcshrc
mv .alias Dropbox/HOME
ln -s ~/Dropbox/HOME/.alias/ .alias
On other linux machines I will have to diff these files and see if there is any way to easily merge them
tkdiff ~/Dropbox/HOME/hlp/ hlp
tkdiff ~/Dropbox/HOME/bin/ bin
tkdiff ~/Dropbox/HOME/web/ web
tkdiff ~/Dropbox/HOME/.vimrc/ .vimrc
tkdiff ~/Dropbox/HOME/.tcshrc/ .tcshrc
tkdiff ~/Dropbox/HOME/.alias/ .alias

Use this link to sign up and you get an additional 250MB of storage.

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