Re: working on cloud

[David Belohrad <david@belohrad.ch>]

I was using before Dropbox for all sort of syncing, especially my org
mode files, which change quite often. Dropbox is generally very fine (as
well e.g. for sharing screenshots between windows and linux
machines). At certain moment I started to have two issues with this:

1) privacy: you're basically giving your data to somebody else. In case
   of emacs init there is no danger. In case of your org data, which
   might contain sensitive information you want to encrypt it, what
   complicates matter when switching between two win/lin machines
2) deadlocks on files. When working in agenda, quite often happened to
   me, that files started to exist in multiple versions. When I took my
   laptop somewhere without wifi signal and edited files, dropbox
   created local copy of this. When in between I have changed that file
   on some other computer with wifi, this file was correctly synced with
   dropbox. At the time, when my laptop appeared again on wifi, it tried
   to sync the file, but as it was in-between edited, it resulted quite
   often in having two files containing almost the same things, which i
   had to manually merge. what a pain. this was the main reason I went
   away from dropbox.

   Unfortunately there is no easy solution for this. I tried to use AFS
   as well, with the same results. The only 'reasonable' way I found for
   this was to use local git copies and do merging, which most of the
   time passes completely automatically without a need for intervention
   (as far as you don't use mobileorg, which adds unique IDs for items
   --> this must be disabled for proper git functionality)

As I said, imho Dropbox is fine for emacs init files (not containing
passwords :). For general stuff it seems to me less obvious.

.d.



Paul Rudin <paul@rudin.co.uk> writes:

> David Belohrad <david@belohrad.ch> writes:
>
>> I use for all emacs files git with server repository. Then on each
>> computer I'm using emacs with, I just clone that repository. The
>> positive side-effect of this is, that when you need to modify sources
>> for a particular computer, you just create new local branch. Then all
>> 'common' init file tweaks can be done in master branch and it is very
>> easy to merge them into local one if needed....
>
> Yes, I have done that sort of thing in the past, but I find the need to
> check stuff in and push/pull and merge unnecessary overheads for this
> kind of thing. Just leaving the file on Dropbox (or whatever) means that
> things are synced automagically when edited which, nearly all the time,
> is what I want. Dropbox keeps a limited revision history for the free
> version (which I use) or you can pay and get an unlimited revision
> history. Of course that's not as useful as using git in terms of merging
> and so on, but it does provide some protection against erroneous
> changes.
>
>
> For added fun keep the git (or whatever) repository on a Dropbox folder
> - this means that you get the automatic updating for things in progress,
> but you can also use the proper version control features too.