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FEATURE
Syncing Dropbox
Fixing Broken Dropbox Syncing
Issue: 21.5 (September/October 2023)
Author: Marc Zeedar
Author Bio: Marc taught himself programming in high school when he bought his first computer but had no money for software. He's had fun learning ever since.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 19,702
Starting Page Number: 17
Article Number: 21503
Resource File(s):
project-21503.zip Updated: 2023-08-31 19:04:24
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Excerpt of article text...
My workflow is that I like to have multiple computers running, each dedicated for certain tasks or projects. Many of these are older computers, and I like knowing that they'll run reliably even if the active work I'm doing on my main computer screws something up.
One of the key tools I use to make all this work is Dropbox. I keep all my work on Dropbox and everything is automatically synced between all my computers. In theory, this means I can grab any computer and continue on a project. It also means I always have a cloud backup of my files.
I've been using Dropbox for years this way and I used to love it for its simplicity and reliability. In recent years, as Dropbox the company has focused on enterprise rather than individuals, the product has gotten worse. They've added crappy features I don't use or want, the Dropbox client is bloated and uses absurd amounts of RAM, the service nags me to enable silly stuff like uploading all my photos (
ugh ) and "business" features, and it doesn't remember my preference settings when the software is updated.
Note : I possibly will be moving to a different sync service at some point, but that is a whole other battle—I need to do research and testing to make sure another service does what I want. In the meantime, I've replaced the official Dropbox client on my machines with the open source Maestral (https://maestral.app
). It has a few awkward limitations, but generally runs far better than Dropbox and uses a fraction of the resources.
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