Pixelastic

Here's one more post in my productivity serie. This one is about the Dropbox service.

What is Dropbox ?

In a nutshell, Dropbox is a private hosting service, based on a cloud infrastructure. Once you've installed the app, one of your folders (default to ~/Dropbox) became synchronized with your Dropbox account. Every document that you save in that folder, and any subfolder you create, will immediatly be saved online in your Dropbox account.

In the real world, it means that you can easily share one folder and all its documents easily between all your computers. If you don't want to install the app, you can simply log to dropbox.com and download/upload any file you want.

How I use it

There a few ways you can use Dropbox. Here are a few of mine, feel free to add yours in the comments.

As I used to work on Windows (and I still have to sometimes), I always had to install a bunch of apps on a brand new computer before being able to start working. This includes the traditional antivirus, browser, music player, IDE, etc. Instead of going through the laborious process of downloading all the installer on each of the websites, I've saved them in my Dropbox and I just have to install Dropbox, then install the apps I need.

Instead of a bunch of todo.txt files spread accross all your computers, wouldn't it be tidier to only have one, shared ?

The same goes for the KeePass file, so you can have an easy access to all your passwords.

I also use it to synchronize my Tomboy notes between my computers (I'll go into more details in another note).

It might be a bit excessive, but I personnally also share my icons, sounds, wallpapers and other customization stuff, so I won't feel lost on a new computer.

Thanks to the amazing Doxie scanner (more on that on another note), I'm now a scan junkie. I scan all the official paperwork I got in my physical mailbox and store it in the Dropbox.

Be it a bill or a banking receipt, I scan anything that looks like official and that I might need again one day. That way, I know I can always connect to dropbox.com and find any official document of the past 5 years in a matter of minutes. This saved my day quite a few time already !

Last words

Dropbox is a free service. You can have 2Go for free, or pay for a more space. I personnaly only use a fraction of that so I stay on the free plan. I haven't mentionned it because I don't use it, but you can also share some folders with other Dropbox users, which is a nice addition when working on the same project.

I made a break of the Ruby/Rails learning this week. Instead I learned a bit more about the basic Linux command, and made a few scripts to help me in my day to day work (and fun) with my Linux environment.

I currently use two laptops. One is a tiny netbook while the other a Dell XPS. I mostly use the XPS for everything work related (like posting this), while the netbook is dedicated to casual use : browsing, playing, etc.

Last week, during my vacations, I only took the netbook with me, and while not strictly speaking working on it I still had to code a little bit. I installed ScummVM, CortixTH and managed to run Carmageddon 2 under wine. I also downloaded and tried a few old emulator games on my Dingoo.

As you may have guessed, I wrote a bunch of scripts during that week to help me in some of the more tedious aspects of this task.

Dingoo deployment

Downloading roms, copying them to the Dingoo, and then testing the games to make sure they are working was tedious. I wrote a little script that automatically mount the Dingoo when plugged to the computer, and copy my games to it, removing old version along the way while still keeping my saved games.

I had to parse dmesg (thanks to grep, tail and sed) as well as use rsync for the copy.

Sansa Clip cleaning

I also wrote a simple script to clean my Sansa Clip of all the useless files I had put on it. As I only have a text screen, I don't need the jpg covers, torrent txt files, auto-generated m3u files and other thumbs.db and .DS_Store useless files.

Here, find to the rescue with some zsh scripting, and here we go.

Shared config files

As I'm working on several computers (two laptops and the one at work at least), I found myself spending time reconfiguring stuff multiple times.

Here, thanks to Dropbox and some clever ln -s calls, I managed to replicate the same config on the 3 machines easily.

From my freelance time, I also have a pretty big /etc/hosts and ~/.ssh/config file. At work, I have another one for the work servers. But I sometimes had to connect to the work server from home.

So once again, thanks to Dropbox, some ln -s once more and cat I wrote two functions to regenerate those two files based on config files. That way, whenever I change one of those files, it is updated on the other machines too.

That was it. It took most of my day.

Being able to script those little repetitive tedious task is something I really appreciate on Linux. I am no longer dependent on the UI my OS gave me, and can now really understand how things work. It requires some time to learn, but this is not going to drastically change from one version to another like it does on each Windows new release.

My computer was starting to get slower and slower for the past days. And I realized my automatic backup wasn't backing anything up for the past month.

And I realized I had different versions of the same files on my 2 laptops...

Well, it seems I have to do some cleaning up.

Synchronizing paperwork

I started by cleaning up my Dropbox folder. I removed shared folders with past clients, and created a "Paperwork" folder where I put all my invoices, contracts and general paperwork.

I also added my private KeePass file as well as other info I may need to access anywhere, anytime.

KeePass allow me to store all my login/password credentials in a secure way (protected by a master password). It is really useful to have this file on all my computers (and mobile phone).

Dropbox is excellent for storing simple files, that you need everywhere. Being able to access invoices and contracts even from my mobile phone proved quite valuable when meeting clients.

Hard backup of personal files

I've also changed my scheduled backups of personal files. I bought an Acronis True Image last year, and reconfigured it today.

I have a hard drive whose sole purpose is to save backups. I scheduled for the first of each month to save : my system state, my applications configuration, and my personal files (photos, saved gamed, writings, etc).

I manually started all this backups to have a clean start. I also forced the backup to restart a whole new file every 6 month (opposed to using the incremental backup).

Backing up my music and movies

I did not spent too much time figuring how to save my hundred of Go of music and movies. I rarely watch the same movies twice, so losing them won't affect me too much.

I occasionally re-watch series, though, but as most of my friends have the same tastes as I, I could very easily get them back from them, or download them (again).

Regarding music, well, I have quite a big collection, but most of it is already "backed up" on my portable mp3 player.

Automatic synchronizing with BitBucket

On my day work, I now always version my files using Mercurial. BitBucket offers unlimited storage, and unlimited public repositories. Private repo are limited to 5 users. As I'm mostly alone on projects that should stay private, this seems the best deal I could found.

Mercurial being a versionning system, I got all the benefits of a backup here, being able to revert to previous versions, update it whenever I want and access it from anywhere.

I wrote a custom Hg hook on commit to automatically push my repos to BitBucket at least once a day (I'll post the code in a future post).

MySQL Backup

I used to backup mysql databases on my work computer using a windows app. This was slowing down my computer on every boot as well and backup was thus only effective when I was working and not when I was on vacations.

Today, I wanted something a lot more flexible, so I set a cronjob on my main host coupled with a slightly edited autoMySQLBackup script.

This will automatically run everyday at midnight and make a local save (with daily, weekly and monthly rotate) of all my clients databases. Logs are saved on disk and gzipped, and will also be sent to a special backup@pixelastic.com mail address (stored on GMail).

This way I am sure to have my mysql backups on two different hosts, with daily and automatic saves, that I can access from anywhere if anything goes wrong.

Conclusion

It took me almost two full days to get the right tools, configure them and write my custom scripts but now, it is seamlessly integrated with my daily workflow. This is a weight off my shoulders, I know I can safely work as usual and my files are saved and easily accessible.