Syncronizing Scrapbook and ToDoList over Dropbox
Thanks to Jerry I got an invitation for Dropbox the other day, managed while playing with it (and some help of an absent mind) to lose important data, and finally figured out where to place this thing in the grand scheme of daily work. It is clearly useful, but how?
Dropbox maps a given folder in your file system (it suggests one, but you can select one yourself) and uses it as a mirror image of the one it has on the server. This means that anything you write to that folder (or sub-folders) or delete from it, replicates on the server. If you install Dropbox on another machine, assign a folder and link it to the server, that new folder will be yet another mirror.
One unpleasant element is that if you want to keep data on the server, you will need to replicate them on your machine, provided they sit nicely somewhere else. So, to me, this is unusable for big working data (especially in light of what I managed to cook up the other day). I found it to be useful for other things, though.
I have been using a Firefox extension called ScrapBook for years. It had initially a sync add-on but someone got tired of updating it, and then I had to sync scrapbooks whenever I synced machines, and this wasn’t optimal. Recently I wrote about a new, similar solution called Zotero. It’s newest (still beta) version tries syncing, but I am not sure if it is stable enough, and there I have a way bigger problem with transferring my ScrapBook data so I still stick with ScrapBook.
Another app that I use in my daily work is ToDoList for time tracking and tasks scheduling and general micro-project management. It’s nifty and sweet. Only, we get the same problem - it’s data storage gets updated between my two machines when I sync them.
Enter Dropbox. I just made folders for both ScrapBook and ToDoList and let the applications store their data there. With every save, Dropbox updates the files on the server and they are ready to be read from my other machine. Now I have to see how this works over longer period of time, but it might be a good solution for all sorts of applications which don’t offer their own syncing capabilities.
