Most of you already know this but still I hope it can be helpful for someone:
TIP: When you are using your apps inside dropbox or other clouds keep in mind that synching always takes a few seconds even for the smallest writing or reading operations. If you have an app that does these things frequently it might not have the time to keep up with dropbox or viceversa and you will get weird results.
There are numerous accounts here of people keeping their source in DropBox experiencing all sorts of bugs they blame on Xojo, when in fact it is due to the bad practice of using DropBox as a drive, instead of a backup solution.
Or worse, DropBox doesn’t handle symbolic links.
So if you develop and build on one machine , you’ll get weird results on your other machines.
Dropbox just makes a copy of whatever the symbolic link was. Apart from bloating your App, you cannot codesign it on another machine because the Framework is now in there twice.
One other thing to note - if a file gets a lot of changes made to it in a short period of time, Dropbox stops syncing. It’ll start up again later, but “later” is an undefined amount of time…
“There is no cloud. It’s just someone elses computer”
I would never rely on a service such as DropBox to do any kind of “version control” or to host important files or whatever.
There are other services focused on that.
In my opinion, DropBox us just a place to quickly share a file or two with someone else
I have my own servers for version control(Subversion) and the occasional file share.
I control my own remote backups and such things. It’s more work but I like it
But for version control there are Github/Bitbucket/Beanstalk and others.
I’m not saying DropBox is bad. It just might not be totally reliable, as you’ve noticed
[quote=230025:@Simon Berridge]Just to put a small positive note on Dropbox I am a part-time personal developer with two development machines (home and laptop).
I use dropbox and have done for a few years now. I have never had any synchronisation issues and am very happy with them.
Simon.[/quote]
Why not take the jump over to a source control system?
A version control system is essential. Yes, it’s a bother. But it has saved my bacon quite a couple of times. @Simon: you never got any corrupted files? You never deleted something accidentally?
[@Simon: you never got any corrupted files?[/quote]
No.
[@Simon: You never deleted something accidentally?[/quote]
Yes, but Dropbox keeps a history. Also, I have a backup system that synchronises my development environment with a separate disk. I have never lost anything and have always managed to recover anything I have either accidentally or deliberately deleted.
Maybe I have been lucky or maybe I don’t hit my machine that hard but I always save before compiling and hitting Cmd-S is so inbuilt to me and dropbox keeps up with me very well.
I’ll add a note of support for Dropbox too. All my work is saved directly into the Dropbox folder and synced up automatically. I don’t ever edit the same project on two machines at the same time, which probably helps with preventing corruption, but for general backup Dropbox has never missed a beat for me.
I also use GIT for everyday version control as the backup facilities that Dropbox provides are very different to version control. You really need to use both in my opinion.
The thing is that a commit to a VCS isn’t the same as a files history on DropBox(as far as I know).
I believe DropBox only have 30 days worth of history.
When a commit is done to(in my case) SVN, a new revision(point in history) is created for a set of changed files with a comment so you can go back in time to a specific revision(point in history). You’ll know what revision to revert to as you can read your own comment on that revision and also compare files between revisions to see what was done when, by whom(if multiple developers work on one project). These systems also work off-line. Just commit when internet is available (Git has the lead here when compared to SVN as you can commit locally and then push changes to the server if I remember correctly.)
This was a simplified explanation though
Once you get a hang of it, it’s really great!
But, If DropBox works, use it! VC is just an alternative This thread went way of topic, sorry Horacio.
[quote=230025:@Simon Berridge]Just to put a small positive note on Dropbox I am a part-time personal developer with two development machines (home and laptop).
I use dropbox and have done for a few years now. I have never had any synchronisation issues and am very happy with them.
Simon.[/quote]
Same here, I have been using Dropbox for several years to sync all my development stuff from my office Mac Pro to my MacBook Pro and vice-versa. I always pause DropBox before building or running/debugging a project. I also pause Dropbox when I will manipulate lots of files. That’s all. No corrupt files, no errors… no issues so far except when building/running/debugging with dropbox syncing.
I use both. I use Subversion (looking at Git now) for source code control. And I use Dropbox as a quick-access, one layer backup/communications tool (a carryover from years pre-version control). But I have never edited the dropbox files directly. I wrote an app that compares my working files with dropbox and shows me the changed files and allows me to “commit” to dropbox. (I did say this was before I jumped to a real version control system, which was a pretty painless change.) I wouldn’t edit source code directly on dropbox. Word documents, maybe, but not source.