Recommendations re: SourceTree + Dropbox

[ellery-mckenzie]

Hi

Does anyone have any recommendations / thoughts regarding the wisdom of using Dropbox as a means of "backing up" a local Sourcetree repository?

I have a feeling that it wouldn't play nicely if I used Dropbox to share the repository but for the purposes of having an accessbile backup I think it'd be ok.

I've been a Sourcetree user for a little while now and just recently tried using Google Drive as a means of backing up my repositories to the cloud. I hit the same problems as discussed here: https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/193702/google-drive-icon-file-issues-with-sourcetree, and then with some experimenting found that Dropbox seems to be able to handle things (so far).

[ellery-mckenzie · Accepted solution]

On the basis of Kieran Senior's comment, I've backed out of using any web-folder sync service (such as Dropbox, Drive, etc) as being too likely to cause corruptions.

So, the answer to my question is: Probably Not A Good Idea.

I guess I'll just have to convince the powers that be to go with a real dcvs service such as github or bitbucket (as mentioned by Mick).

[KieranA]

Don't take my word as gospel, but we had had a few reports of this happening. I don't know how dropbox manages its files, but presumably there's metadata associated with folders which is probably what caused the problems people had been reporting. Seems a bit weird to backup a repository though, they should already be backed up through their hoster. Alternatively if you self-manage your repositories you can always set up multiple remotes and push them to various sources that are still private.

[ellery-mckenzie]

I hear you Kieran.

Google Drive destroyed my test respository on the spot by adding icon files to every directory including those under .git. Dropbox didn't but in principle it strikes me that any sync-based service is capable of causing these kind of issues.

For me this all started because we use Google Drive as our primary document store and I wanted to see if we could store remote repositories there as a convenient means of sharing among the team. It seems now that we'd be better off with a real solution like bitbucket.

[MJ]

Might Bitbucket be something useful to you?

[ellery-mckenzie]

I'd like to say yes, but there is some organisational inertia to contend with first

[KieranA]

People do do this, but as a sidenote it has been known to corrupt repositories as it changes things in the .git folder. This isn't to say it won't work, just be careful when trying things out and just back up your repository before you test anything :)