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Comment by edanm | Hacker News Reader

A few gems for easier computer use:

1. Buy a 50gb Dropbox account, put all the folders you care about in there (all your projects, documents, music, etc.). Makes life so much funner when you know you don't have to worry about losing your important documents ever again.

2. Start using a password management tool like Keepass. Makes you rely less on memory, which makes life on a computer less stressful. I wrote an article about this recently with some tips and tricks (http://www.loopycode.com/solving-sign-up-anxiety/).

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I just paid for mozy (http://www.mozy.com) and it automatically and constantly backups the folders you choose with unlimited storage at a very reasonable price. It seems to me like a much better solution (for backup) than dropbox. However, I also have a free dropbox account for shifting files between computers.

I've been doing a lot of work on backups -- A few months ago I had a crash of a nearly new harddrive. Nothing could be recovered from it. I did have important stuff (like source code) backed up but it was still unpleasant. My advice: spend a few days working on your backups.

I wrote up my ideal Dropbox configuration: http://giantrobotlasers.com/post/684259169/the-ideal-desktop...

I'm told the symlinks should go in opposite directions, but generally this setup is very clean.

Regarding Keepass, how do you log in to some service when you're not at your work station? Is there some way to distribute the database it uses to mutiple computers?

Well you can keep the database file in Dropbox :)

How do you deal with either working from your Dropbox folder ( convoluted) or having duplicate folders (local syncing)?

When I did the same thing, I just moved my filesystem into it, set everything to download into it, and away I went. It also helped me actually do something with info, rather than leave it there and not touch it.

However, I bet on a mac you could rsync or cron it to keep local and DB together.

Great question, I spent a lot of time thinking about that. Eventually, I realized that it wasn't convoluted to work from my Dropbox folder. At least the problem wasn't keeping project files there. After all, most projects are just lots of source code, and it doesn't matter where it sits.

The big problem with keeping projects in there is that each project might have computer-specific configurations. I try to keep those to a minimum, by e.g. using relative directories whenever possible. For the few things that I can't keep completely relative, I rely on environment variables that I set on each computer I work on.

Other than that, I haven't run into any problems working right out of my Dropbox directory. At one point I considered running all my software from Dropbox (using portable versions), but that really did cause a lot of headache (most programs have session-specific configuration which would cause problems on different computers).

Have you run into any other problems with keeping projects inside Dropbox?

Mostly I found it annoying to switch from ~ to ~/Dropbox while on the command line.

Is there any way to change the folder Dropbox? If so, I guess it could be the same as ~.

You can do it with a registry hack, but I didn't/wouldn't go down that road.

No need to choose. Create a symbolic link.

You can create these via drag and drop in Linux (ctrl+shift in Gnome) and OSX (command+option), and via some other trickery in Windows.

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

One note for Windows users: Dropbox doesn't work well with symlinks. So you'll have to put the actual directory into Dropbox, and create a symlink to it from wherever it is you want.

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