Dropbox: Sync Files Between Your Computers

Posted on July 27, 2009 by Bruce Keener

My consulting activities generally involve working with lots and lots of files. Most of the time I work with those files on my iMac or with the Mac’s Windows XP partition, courtesy of VMware Fusion. (I have file-sharing enabled for selected folders between my iMac and Windows partition.) But, sometimes I like to get away from the Mac and use my Windows Vista laptop. By keeping it in another room, it’s sort of like getting a “change in scenery,” which is sometimes good for my frame of mind.

Thanks to Dropbox, I am able to switch between computers with no loss of momentum, because I can access the exact same files on my laptop as I could on my iMac and its Windows partition. All I had to do to make this work was download the Dropbox client to my iMac and to the laptop, designate a folder to upload to Dropbox, and viola: it keeps the files from that folder in sync between my iMac and Windows laptop.

My account is one of the “freemium” ones … no charge for accounts that use less than 2GB space. (I use about 1GB.)

I’m sure there are other providers of this sort of service, in addition to Dropbox. They happened to be the one I tried and I liked them well enough to not look around any further. Since it works well for me, I thought I’d share it with you in case you want to add it to your toolbox.

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  • John

    Another solution is to use a version control system like Subversion and its client TortoiseSVN. I have one of my computers running the Subversion service. That works great when all computers are on the same LAN. Apart from allowing me to access the same files from all the computers, it also does — guess what — version control! So I don’t have to worry I accidentally overwrite something important.

    p.s. To use it across the net is a bit tricky though. You need to have a permanent IP address for the server.

    • http://www.keenerliving.com/ Bruce Keener

      Interesting, John. I suppose I could set up on this site’s server. Does SVN work well with MS Office files and PDFs, though? Almost all of the files I deal with in consulting are doc, xls, ppt, or xls.

      • John

        Yes, it will just treat them as binary files.

    • John

      Forget to say, TortoiseSVN is a client for Windows Explorer integration. There are other clients. I suppose some of them will work on Mac. But I haven’t checked.

      • http://www.keenerliving.com/ Bruce Keener

        Thanks John!

  • Thomas R. Hall

    There are others, including Box.net, but I really dig Dropbox. The interface is done well. Also, know what John is saying as well on Subversion. I like TortoiseSVN myself, but the Mac options are a bit lacking. There is SCPlugin, but it’s not as good as TortoiseSVN is on Windows.

    I actually did Subversion myself, but the thing is to remember to sync. With Dropbox, it is seamless, and you can easily share individual files publicly, etc. Good thought, though, John! Not enough people take advantage of things like Subversion locally. It’s a great option.

    Plus, I love syncing my 1Password data via Dropbox to multiple Macs. ;) Great tip, Bruce!

    • http://www.keenerliving.com/ Bruce Keener

      Good comments, Thomas. Good points you raise about having to stay on top of subversion for syncing. Like you, though, I really appreciate John bringing it up. Always good to know what your options are.