First of all: I am not a real fan of Dropbox: Storing my data in a cloud somewhere located in the USA relying on other cloud services (Amazon S3 in the case of Dropbox) without any transparent security measures makes me feel odd when I started to share private pictures or tax declarations over multiple computers.

I always find it quite brave when people upload their thesis in Dropbox believing that it is secure (and Amazon crashed multiple times including data loss [1,2]) when having the ability to store data on university infrastructures.

Since I am more and more working with git(hub), I recognized that in such a scenario, Dropbox is the perfect match for sharing local source code over multiple computers:

  • Synchronization is one of the major benefits of Dropbox
  • When working with different clients, you always have your (even uncommitted) work synchronized on multiple site really simplifying development on multiple sites.
  • Data is secured at your repo anyhow (so you don’t have to have availability /integrity / accountability concerns about changes on your data).
  • The open-source source code is public anyway so you don’t have to think about confidentiality.

The only thing that can happen at the beginning is the insertion of redundant branches when synchronized the first time. If so, just go to

.git/refs/remotes

and remove the irrelevant copies.