

The Cleverest Ways to Use Dropbox That You’re Not Using - thekguy
http://lifehacker.com/5527055/the-cleverest-ways-to-use-dropbox-that-youre-not-using

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poundy
Please never store Truecrypt files in dropbox. I have tried this and it does
not work as mentioned.

A small additional file changes the encrypted file so much that it causes
dropbox to sync a large change through to the server although dropbox only
sync's changes.

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crocowhile
True. encFS is much better choice. It can be transparently mounted as regular
folder in linux but I don't know if there is a windows way of accessing to it.

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MikeCapone
Related but a bit off-topic:

Has the security of dropbox ever been analysed by someone who knows what
they're doing? How safe are my files there, from a "not losing them" point of
view, and from a "not being hacked" pov?

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pavs
They use Amazon's S3, so as far as not losing your files is concerned, you are
as likely to lose files on dropbox as you are on any other services that
relies on S3 for storage.

Personally, I am interested to know more about privacy. Can dropbox employees
access any files anytime they want and look at any information from account?
Reading some comments (last year) on their forum in reply to file deletion I
got the impression that they have unlimited access to user files. I don't have
any citation nor can I verify that assumption at the moment.

~~~
crocowhile
> They use Amazon's S3, so as far as not losing your files is concerned, you
> are as likely to lose files on dropbox as you are on any other services that
> relies on S3 for storage

Dropbox will sync on any computer you use though. That means that you have a
copy per computer, plus the server.

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countersignaler
The real risk is that they accidentally "update" my files out of existence or
revert them to some point way in the past in a way that can't be undone. The
change might push to all my devices before I realized it. I periodically tar
my dropbox and put it on a backup disk.

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sjs
I've had dropbox lose files inside bundles. We were abusing dropbox with
hundreds of thousands of small files, so I'd be very careful about putting
your entire $HOME folder in there since it's a pretty similar scenario. My
personal rule is that only copies of data go into dropbox. Nothing important
ever "lives" in dropbox.

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rufo
Wow, this is literally the first time I've ever heard of Dropbox actively
losing data. Not that this is especially helpful, but were the files at least
available inside the Dropbox web UI?

For what it's worth, I've been using the 0.7x series with several small-to-
medium-sized Git repositories (over a quarter-million files/directories) with
no ill effects to speak of beyond Dropbox taking a while to initialize.

Of course the repositories themselves have several copies on the various
developer machines and GitHub, and I keep a Time Machine volume handy as a
backup.

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sjs
We were abusing Dropbox beyond belief at that company. We had a single account
w/ 50GB and there were about 5 of us sharing the single account, updating it
simultaneously. Dropbox was simply never meant for that.

Now that I think about it, $HOME in Dropbox might be ok since (presumably)
there'd only be one person using it at any given time.

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MikeCapone
The best use that I've found (and it was recommended by someone here) is to
put your 1Password data file in your dropbox directory so that it's up to date
on all your computers.

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altano
Take a look at LastPass. This is built-in (syncs to the internet).

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dmix
The chrome interface sucks. Surprisingly because their website is quite nice.

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vdm
I wouldn't go so far as to say it sucks. It's rough, or spartan, but in a good
(fastmail.fm) way. And fast. Lastpass on Chrome is the only password manager
I've been able to live with, and I've tried a few.

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bkrausz
When my cofounder was finishing his Masters thesis and went dark for a week
(no IM, limited email), I would use dropbox to communicate vital things to
him. I just made a file called "did you remember to sign this", and he would
`echo "yes"` into it. Worked amazing well, since it basically gave me a live
pipe into his growl notifications.

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pilif
so you used Dropbox/Growl to still pull him out of his concentration,
something he even quit IM to prevent from happening.

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979s
I've used dropbox for remote teamwork. The experience worked magically, and
the non-web savvy group interacted with it well. I even got enough bonus space
for inviting new people to store our entire project.

One issue: because editing and saving is not live there were some issues,
namely that we had to coordinate who was using the document when. We ended up
with several conflicted copies and extra work.

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joe_bleau
How do you deal with people leaving the team?

I didn't dig too deep, but when we let someone go, we'd prefer that they not
be able to access our private files anymore. (Especially when they go to work
for a competitor!)

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dkokelley
Unshare the folder with them.

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ciex
and don't mark the box titled 'Let him keep the files'

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breck
I recently implemented a somewhat clever Dropbox hack for a client's project.

Basically, their customers had to upload hundreds of photos to a website and
found it to be a pain. We created an unofficial dropbox API and were able to
automatically create a shared folder (and invite the customer to it). Then,
when the customer added files to that folder, we automatically synced them
with the web app, bypassing the web uploader.

Would also make a great Facebook Pics/Dropbox app.

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kmfrk
A long time ago, I tried to get torrenting to work, but it seems that Dropbox
auto-deletes any .torrents. Has anyone managed to get this to actually work?

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pilif
yepp. Works fine for me. No auto deletion going on here.

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kgermino
Another: Set your desktop to a foode in dropbox. It works well to me because
my computers are all set up similiarly and most of the shortcuts on my desktop
are chrome web app pages but in my use case it has been very effective and
convient.

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volomike
As a web developer, build a cron in /etc/crontab to do an rsync compressed
backup of your /var/www to Dropbox. You can even improve upon it by storing
files for each day of the week, overwriting previous files.

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thunk
Symlinking is your friend. There are a few gotchas listed here:

<http://wiki.dropbox.com/TipsAndTricks/SyncOtherFolders>

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edanm
Important Gotcha for Windows users: "Windows may not update changes to
symlinked files automatically."

They recommend putting the real folder inside your Dropbox folder, and
symlinking to it from the other locations.

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seldo
Nearly all of my spec work goes on inside Dropbox; it makes brain-dead simple
to know that I'm always working on the latest revision, whether I last edited
it on my laptop, home or work machine.

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petercooper
Also good for your ~/.ssh/config file (so you get the same aliases on all your
machines) and, if you're trusting (and I'm not), your private key.

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drivebyacct
Truecrypt volumes aren't striped...

