Cloud Storage for Synchronous Development General tech support, or help with things about technology, internet slang, gadgets/trends, or news

[Neo]

Tomorrow is moving day, which means tonight is moving night.

I'm finally going to be shutting off my computer (intentionally) and packing it up after nearly 3.5 years of it being on, and stationary. I haven't taken this computer to Quakecon, it hasn't been to a LAN party, and it hasn't been packed up in its LANParty Harness - at least not in the current configuration. I'm only slightly concerned that it will make it to the other side of the move safely since every now and then it'll reboot itself and tell me it can't find an operating system. I guess that's the price I pay for having a 2TB drive as my primary hard disk.

That is why I'm backing up everything for the website to dropbox to make sure what I have on all my computers is current. This process of backing up is the only reason I'm taking the time to write about it - because I haven't run dropbox on this computer in 17 days (though it's constantly running on the MacBook).

For those wanting to do development or design work, I recommend using a cloud storage folder on your disk as the directory for your work. Then all your work will be instantly backed up (provided you have the program running in the background), and you won't have to worry about your computers being out of sync (aside from IDE workspace configurations and such across operating systems).

I use Dropbox for my code these days, and used Microsoft Groove back in the Office 2007 beta days, which transitioned to Mesh, then Windows Live Mesh, then Windows Live Sync, then SkyDrive, and now OneDrive. These days I use OneDrive for my photos and financial/personal business documents (I have a little more trust in Microsoft than I do Dropbox), and it keeps my printouts for all the House stuff available on every computer, and every device whenever I needed it.

With Dropbox, I also use Github for the version control. This pairing causes the .git folder to reside in dropbox, so all my computers where I do development stay in sync with the same revision - it's then just up to me to make sure my IDE stays configured the same all over the place.

For design work, though, I used to use a program called Pixelapse. This would store version history for images online. However, their service was slow, and a pain in the ass unless you paid - and even then, it was just a little less painful. Dropbox bought them, at some point, so I imagine this feature set will eventually make its way into Dropbox. Until that time, I store the source files (fireworks PNG and photoshop PSD files) in a separate folder inside the Dropbox directory, and the exports (JPG, PNG, etc files) in another folder in the Dropbox directory. Then, while I'm building out the site on tsn, no matter which computer I'm on, I have access to the source image files and the export images files - and no longer have to wait until I get back to a different computer to grab an image for a profile pic or avatar.

I've made a similar post about all this before, but it was on The Pizzy - about living in the cloud, and trying to use these types of programs to sync software settings (like digsby IM client, and such). I've only recently started doing it with images, primarily so I would have a backup of all the logos, avatars, and work I've put into the tsn8 and v13 logos for the sites this time around, instead of relying on layers and layers of backup zip files stored in a many years old 700GB hard drive (as it currently is).

Well, my dropbox backups are done. What do you use file sync and cloud storage for? Or does this give you an idea for something you could do?

[Neo]

The computer survived the move, but the keyboard didn't want to find its drivers when I reconnected it. That's what I get for using an off-brand gaming keyboard, I guess.

Here's the brand new desk, and lamp.