Become a Dropbox ninja!

I’ve known Dropbox for very long. I’ve already found it to be an extremely cool service, however – I like to have things automated, the little programmer inside all of us. I didn’t want to “Drop” my files manually into the Dropbox folder all the time. That was time consuming, and I would forget to do it – sort of eliminating the purpose.

I wanted Dropbox to sync everything automatically across all my machine, I wanted to still have my files where they would originally be on my Desktop. On my Laptop, that didn’t matter – since I only use it for browsing the web, sometimes I program a bit on it, though. On my Desktop, I have all my Photos, configuration files, and code. I wanted to have these files available everywhere, anytime.

The solution to this was simple, very simple because of symbolic links, under Linux (my desktop, and main computer) I’d just download Dropbox, and place the special folder in my ~, then start throwing symbolic links in. First of, my photos.

$ ln -s Photos Dropbox/Photos

Then all my local code:

$ ln -s /var/www Dropbox/Programming

Then my Dumper which is basically anything else than videos, photos, music and programming:

$ ln -s Dumper Dropbox/Dumper

In my dumper I even did symbolic links to some of the configuration directories (e.g. Vim configuration, .bashrc etc.)

It started syncing, and now the magic of Dropbox is a lot more tempting to me. I now have everything, and the most recent version of it, available everywhere (iPhone, Laptop, Web), and it’s securely backed up.

If Dropbox seems tempting to you (now?), be sure to sign up at Dropbox.com If you’d like to help me, and yourself, you can signup via my referral link and you’ll get (and give) 250 mb extra to the 2gb default free limit!

Furthermore, Dropbox has a great wiki with various addons and tips & and tricks . They even have a CLI to Dropbox, which I use nowadays on Arch Linux when I’m without Nautilus.