Working directly from Dropbox?

[artmaknev]

I am working in two locations, and it is a bit time consuming to always backup stuff from one location and then resume work from another place... especially updating map paths.

 

I was wondering, if anybody ever tried working directly from Dropbox, it looks like Dropbox is saving everything to a local hard drive as a copy and then syncs everything to the cloud. I am thinking about fully uploading my entire library and works folder so everything can be synced between two computers (home and office) and backed up to the cloud?

 

Right now, I am uploading almost 1TB of data, estimated time is 45 days!! ouch! But I hope once it syncs with the cloud, I can then work directly from dropbox, and will constantly sync new files between two machines. what is also nice is the dropbox app, I can always look for any file on my phone.

Edited August 31, 2015 by artmaknev

[Scott Schroeder]

It depends on how big your files are. The annoying thing is that every time you save, you sync to dropbox which means your internet traffic is near constant if you save every 5 minutes like I do. It's best to set a time sync, such as everyday at lunch hour and again at say 10pm. You can still save all you want, but you only sync to Dropbox twice a day. Also helpful if you have an ISP that monitors your upload traffic and will either stop your internet or severely throttle down your speed once you get to a certain per month data upload limit.

 

This is also helpful in Dropbox's revisions as it only saves the last few copies as backups, so you won't have all of your intermittent saves constantly overwriting your revisions.

 

I think it's great working from Dropbox, but not as a place to store my assets as well. It's a waste of $$$$ for my many many gigs of images to sit in the cloud.

[artmaknev]

I had no idea about timed sync, it sounds great! So basically, working directly from Dropbox really means working from your local drive that dropbox is linked to? is that correct? and then this local drive can be backed up twice a day to the cloud? So I am thinking about buying dedicated portable drive (2TB) and link the dropbox to it, is that a good idea? I just need to find the best mobile solution.

[James Vella]

Not sure how easy it is to setup a timed sync with Dropbox but what you could do is have your files saved to a spot on the drive, which SyncToy backs up twice a day or whatever. Synctoy is great for this stuff.

[artmaknev]

Thanks for advice, I think I will just dedicate HDD on each PC for dropbox, so both HDDs in different locations are in sync with each other and the cloud. And I will map the HDDs to a letter "X" on both locations, so I can work from X letter, hopefully it will keep the map paths easy to manage.

 

External HDD is not good idea as I read on dropbox FAQ. I will just run a local backup daily to external HDD.

 

Thanks for suggesting SyncToy, I am actually using SyncBackPro right now, it does same thing I think.

 

Scott - I couldn't find a way to change dropbox sync settings, it doesn't let me sync twice a day, it appears to be syncing constantly... Where do you go to change those settings?

[jasonstewart]

What was suggested was to save to a local folder and sync from that local folder to your dropbox folder twice a day. In that case you don't have to change your dropbox settings.

[artmaknev]

Just to make it clear, there is no timed syncing in dropbox, but there is a way to turn off automatic syncing and use other software such as syncbackpro to backup from local drive to dropbox twice a day. So this is what I will do:

 

1) Dedicate internal HDD for dropbox (2TB drive) - I don't feel safe if dropbox folder is also on the same HDD.. and its also using twice as much space.

2) Turn off dropbox auto sync

3) Use other software to sync between local HDD to dropbox HDD once or twice a day

4) Dropbox will sync to the cloud and to my other PC at the office

 

Did I get it right?

 

Have you used NAS with dropbox?

Edited September 2, 2015 by artmaknev