Drop Box Question

[BobG]

I did a bit of searching on this forumn and dropbox website and was not able to find an answer to this. Hopefully I am not repeating something that has been posted before. I signed up for dropbox account yesterday and installed the software on both my Windows PC and my DroidX.

To familiarize myself with how it works I crated a simple text file on the pc and put it in the drop box folder.

I have been able to download the file to the phone, edit it on the pc and download it again. However the process has been entirely manual. In other words I had to find the file using the dropbox application and request a download into the folder on the SD Card. This is useful, however, I was imagining something a little more automatic. Am I missing something? In other words can I set things up to automatically download/upload files in the dropbox folder. Alternatively, once I have a file in both places can I upload changes to that particular file automatically and download to the other location automatically?

 

[brinky]

You need to work with the file in the dropbox folder on both your PC and your your phone. From the app on your phone you just choose open and then work with the file and as soon as you are done it will sync back up to dropbox. Same on your PC. Open and work with the files in the dropbox folder so they sync as soon as you are done editing them.

If you move them out of the folder to work on them, then yes you have to move them back for the sync to work.

 

[BobG]

Thanks for the reply.

Maybe I am just being impatient.

I will try editing first from one direction and then the other and see what happens.

 

[DenverRalphy]

Dropbox should automatically sync between your PC and Online/Cloud account. However there is no automatic sync to your Android device. The reason being is that with handheld devices usually having much less storage space, it would not be uncommon to see your handheld device's storage rapidly filled to capacity. Therefore your Android device requires manual requests to download the file or sync.

The inherent design of DropBox is that of a back-up service. Not really designed to be an offline drive (although the DropBox forums are full of feature requests that would make it that way).

 

[BookLover]

If you install Quick Office or Documents to Go and link to your Dropbox thru QO/D2G, you edit the cloud document instead of having to download locally to your Droid first. One of the first things I tested out.

 

[temotodochi]

hi

Just registered after searching a bit for automatic dropbox sync on my SGS device. I havent found a solution yet and the dropbox official
"reason" is utter BS. It basically states it is not possible to
sync because android OS does not allow it to happen. WTF?

There are hundreds or thousands of software which do sync
files and other stuff automatically in the background.
Some even only use wifi, unless user changed the
settings to allow 3G transfer also.

The main reason is that dropbox does not want the service to be
in the background, they want user to know that they are using dropbox.

Dropbox should automatically sync between your PC and Online/Cloud account. However there is no automatic sync to your Android device. The reason being is that with handheld devices usually having much less storage space, it would not be uncommon to see your handheld device's storage rapidly filled to capacity.

That's not a reason. You should be able to determine that yourself as a user. Its laziness on behalf of dropbox.

It would be quite easy to set up certain directory within your dropbox space to be the only one synced automatically. That would minimize the risk to accidentally fill up your phone.

So, any alternatives for dropbox which really do know what "automatic" means?


ps. Just noticed that for every dropbox, i wrote dosbox instead.

---

temotodochi

 

[Katmeat]

Check out the free Dropspace program in the Market; it supposedly solves this problem by syncing files on your SD card with your Dropbox account. Just trying it out myself now...