DropBox as Version Control and Offsite Backup

Question

After reading Michael Lopp's book "Being Geek," I started using Dropbox as a means of synchronizing files between my home computer and work computer. It's been fantastic, it really makes it painless to keep track of the latest version of files you're working on.

My question has to do with people's experience with this tool, especially programmers who may have used it to develop larger projects.

Right now, I see 3 main uses of Dropbox:

1. synchronize files between home and work computers
2. version control (you have to log into the dropbox site to access previous versions)
3. off-site backup

Right now I'm using it as my main backup tool, which I'm not sure is a good idea. But right now I have a local (working) copy of my entire project "checked out" on each computer (my home laptop and my work computer), and additionally, my entire project is kept on the dropbox site. So I'm thinking, if anything happens to one of my computers, or both, I'll still have that off-site backup available and I'll simply have to reinstall dropbox to access all my files.

Does anyone have experience with doing this? Has anyone done a major file recovery using dropbox? Or is this even widely used? Thanks for your feedback in advance.

Answer 1

Using Dropbox to maintain several files and its associated metadata when those files are historized in a VCS is always a bit tricky because of potential corruption issue (if one of those metadata part of the repository isn't correctly synchronized, you can end up with a non_working repo)

That is why I always use with DropBox:

• a DVCS (like Git): I can work directly in a working tree within a DropBox repo or I can clone said repo anywhere else outside the DropBox if I need to,
• a single bundle file to which I can push at any time the changes from my local repo, wherever that repo might be.

That way, the only file that really need to be in sync in DropBox is that unique bundle file (representing a bare repo as one file).

See "Git with DropBox" for more.