The best way to use Dropbox, as a developer.
It recently became 3 months since I started on my journey to learn how to code, and I have to say, I have come a really long way. I feel really experienced in the whole world of the Ruby language, having got my roots on pretty much all of its web frameworks. It seems all to easy, now. With all these frameworks I’m learning I have so many projects to maintain, and I keep creating more and more, day by day. I’m still in that learning process, where I feel every project I code will be “of great use to me, in the future”. I pretty much never delete or get rid of my projects, atleast the ones which aren’t that bad.
With all of these projects, I feel scared that one day my Mac will just crash for no reason at all, and take the hard drive down with it. That would mean I would lose every single thing I’ve ever created. If I lose all of that, I might as well just stop coding, because it’s these projects I do that keep me going and learning new stuff. I have a couple of full-fledge Rails projects which I always go to for reference material, besides the usual StackOverFlow. And yes I know there’s Github having them completed secure and stored away. I would still lose all the other projects which I keep to myself, and away from the Internet, because they’re embarassingly stupid projects.
It was at this point, I was already a big user of the mighty Dropbox. I mainly kept my pictures, screenshots, and file downloads there, because I didn’t have much storage on it, and didn’t want to pay for any plans. But I really never thought of combining Dropbox and my code, to actually create a “backup” of every single thing I coded together. It seemed so simple and easy, and would take a whole load of my shoulders, having all the code in the cloud…
And so I made the move. I did all the extra tasks to achieve more storage, and tried to get as many referrals as possible, to all my friends and family. Then, I moved my entire folder of code, to Dropbox, to have it backed up. I kept it there, and installed Dropbox on my Mac, so I can access it directly. I then symlinked it to my main directory, from the Dropbox folder, so it seems like it’s still in my code, in the Terminal. Once the whole process was done, all was smooth sailing.
There were no problems at all in the process, because of how convenient it is to move folders into Dropbox. I was now coding “into the cloud”. After a bit of research on Dropbox’s other features, I found out you can host static websites on Dropbox and have them public to be viewed by anyone, just like a regular website. I found some services to host custom domains on the Dropbox files, so I could redirect subdomains, to the Dropbox files. I found blogging engines that could be hosted on my own Dropbox like Scriptogr.am and DropPages.
I never knew there was so much to Dropbox. With this newfound discovery, I now know that Dropbox has to be one of the best creations on the Internet, and cloud services as a whole. I recommend all developers out there to transfer their code to Dropbox in order to backup everything they’ve made.
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