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I hate to be "that guy," but...
Authored by: leamanc on Dec 02, '10 08:50:56PM

I've never been one to complain "hey, this is not a hint," but really this one screams out for it. The whole point of Dropbox is to sync things across computers. In this case, it's really a no-brainer because you can choose where to put this particular app's data folder, so yeah, put it inside ~/Dropbox.

But even if there are apps you want to sync that don't have prefs to move its data folder to a different directory, you can always use symlinks via the ln -s command. This is in Dropbox's documentation. They even have an Automator workflow so you don't have to touch the Terminal. It's officially supported by them, and it's not much of a secret. They plan to add this functionality into the main Dropbox app at some point, on Mac/Win/Linux. We could run tons of "hints" about how to sync bookmarks, mail, Stickies, whatever with Dropbox, but really the "hint" here is that Dropbox syncs stuff. Which is kind of like posting a hint called "Play AAC files with iTunes."

Sorry to be a grouch, and I feel bad because I've never made a post like this in my 9-10 years on Mac OS X Hints, but if there is a useful tip in this hint, it should have been reformatted as a general write-up on Dropbox's ability to sync things outside of ~/Dropbox, with multiple examples.

Sorry Craig, I know you're trying your best and I support you, but being an editor means separating the wheat from the chaff, and rewriting, re-formatting, or re-purposing borderline material into something more useful. It's not just about picking which posts to run and correcting the typos.



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I hate to be "that guy," but...
Authored by: tempel on Dec 03, '10 06:17:36AM

While the hint is indeed not a good hint, the responses (but yours) here are helpful: They all show that doing this is actually dangerous, and unexpectedly so.

So, while the hint alone is rather useless, the warnings about the dangers of doing it that way are valuable. Hence, in summary, it's good that this hint appears here in order to warn others.



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I hate to be "that guy," but...
Authored by: leamanc on Dec 03, '10 12:47:21PM

That's the most specious reasoning I have seen in a long time. If the site is going to run hints so that people can post how bad they are, then we might as well shut down the site now.

And all the warnings about how "dangerous" Dropbox syncing of data directories is, are actually pretty moot points as long as the same app is not running on multiple Dropbox-enabled computers.



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I hate to be "that guy," but...
Authored by: tempel on Dec 03, '10 12:59:05PM

But that's the whole point of this hint - sharing the Things database between multiple Macs, isn't it?



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