Dropbox (YC 07) selective sync (experimental build) | Hacker News Reader

Dropbox (YC 07) selective sync (experimental build)

forums.dropbox.com

59 pointsjrnkntl20 comments

I think Dropbox has gone sufficiently mainstream now that we don't need to mention YC07 as part of their name :)

When I forgot it two weeks ago, a moderator added it. There's nothing wrong in remembering everyone that this awesome product/service was part of YC '07 :)

YC 07 fo life

Beantown Summer forever.

Great, this has been the only sticking point I've had, such as setting dropbox up on the girlfriends laptop just for some occasional code access I don't want everything I have in there to download.

Your girlfriend could just get her own dropbox account and then you share a folder between you. That's what we do with work. We all have our own dropbox account, but then we share a folder between us all and only that folder gets shared to others.

Now I just want a way to select what not to sync during the installation process, so it's not starting to download all the files right before I tell it to not download all those files....

But kudos to the Dropbox team. This is the one feature I've been waiting to get before I drop money on a larger plan and start syncing my music and photos.

That's pretty much what I am waiting for before installing it on my limited space laptop.. Is this in the works?

Kind of bummed they seem to have gone the exact opposite of what I was expecting.

I want to choose the folders (that live anywhere) to sync, I don't want to not sync some stuff in my Dropbox folder.

But such is the life of a technical user using a consumer app.

I think they've said they're working on that.

As I recall (since I haven't used it in a year or more), SugarSync does this and has a free 2GB account, though it lacks a Linux client.

Live Mesh does this.

SpiderOak does this. (I'm a founder.)

As someone who tried and wanted to like SpiderOak enough to buy a plan (esp during your specials), I just couldn't get past the amount of inherent complexity in the user interface, and the way that backups/syncs are handled.

I wanted to be able to easily define a synced set of data, and be able to have a simple way to replicate that synchronized data onto my other machines. Why do I need to set up a backup point on every machine first, and then individually link every machine's empty backup point to the main synchronized folder? And why isn't there an easy way to restore the backed up or synchonized directories to a machine if I have to wipe and reinstall? I can't even imagine trying to get my mother to set up and use SpiderOak...

In the end, I gave up on SpiderOak and decided to get a paid Dropbox account instead, even though SpiderOak had the security/encryption stance I wanted and cost significantly less than Dropbox. SpiderOak just exposes too much complexity to the user, IMO.

Thanks for listening to my rant. Sorry for dragging things off topic.

The feature you're after is called 'Watch any folder' and it needed selective sync to be done in order to be implemented. It's in the works! :)

You can fake it by using symbolic links (or junctions if you're on Windows):

http://wiki.dropbox.com/TipsAndTricks/SyncOtherFolders

Yes! One of the easiest set-it-and-forget-it products out there with OSX/Windows/Linux support. Plus new features like this based on users priority feedback = great.

Dropbox was originally built for small development teams as an easy alternative to source control. The kind of selective sync I'd like to see would involve regular expressions to filter out dlls and build artifacts.

If that's true the focus had already shifted when Drew applied to YC:

http://files.dropbox.com/u/2/app.html

dropbox is great, though I've been bitten in the past by some funny issues when setting it up on my newer computer that has a case sensitive file system (basically there'd be both a Projects and projects folder, the former would be empty overall, but deleting it would delete the latter).

The selective sync is great, though I don't quite see why this would a nontrivial feature to engineer.

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