Dropbox: the easy way

[themamboman]

I'm sure I'm not the first to think of this but in case someone is wondering, it's really simple to integrate DropBox into WinUAE.

Basically, you let the underlying OS do the heavy lifting. The Amiga side just gets access to the local folder.

If you are on the Windows side, you have to find the actual location of the local folder where DropBox does it's sync'ing.

Windows side:
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- Right-click the tooltray DropBox icon, this will bring up it's menu, click the gear icon in the upper right corner of this new window. Look at this for help finding it:

http://i.imgur.com/YDwTakB.jpg


- When you click the gear icon, select Preferences, then in the new window, select the Advanced tab. Then you'll see the real folder DropBox uses. Shown here:

http://i.imgur.com/ZZvPPt6.png


Now, in your WinUAE setup, add a new Directory as another folder, and use this path you just found. See this image:

http://i.imgur.com/6XAXyfU.png


Then, it should show up as another drive on your Workbench. I took the liberty of finding a PNG file on images.google.com for dropbox (sized 48x48 in my case) and saved that to an accessible folder on the Amiga side. I renamed the .png file to .info. I then selected the drive icon for DropBox, right-clicked to get Icon->Information, and draged the renamed png image to the image on the Information window, saved it and this is the result:

http://i.imgur.com/vZUHT0q.png


This drive is now accessible to any Amiga program (example: Directory Opus). I have copied files to it and seen those files show up on my Android phone within seconds.

The only downside (at the moment) is that I have to manually update the window on the Amiga side to see any new files that were added externally. Also, I have to Show->All to see anything. Finally, the space used/free isn't reflective of the Dropbox limits, but the harddrive where the Dropbox folder on Windows is located.

However, this is a very easy and quick way to have DropBox on your emulated Amiga.

Next up, trying to figure out something similar by mounting the Windows Dropbox folder using Samba (or something similar).

Hope that helps someone!

TheMamboMan

[kipper2k]

Cloud servers are bad. You may as well send all your files to the NSA and they will put them up for you.

[TCD]

Not sure why I'd use Dropbox in WinUAE, but I sure want to pass my tinfoil hat blueprints on to kipper I'm pretty sure 98.3% of us don't have NSA worthy material on their WinUAE setups (and a big [fingers crossed] to the other 1.7% )

[Hungry Horace]

old thread i know, but i sync my amiga files across dropbox quite a bit, moving over to ownCloud in time....

The reason is simple, i dont like having to manually sync up various projects i work on, and also it means not having to make manual backups.
I used to use a USB but they broke in my wallet too often.


Reason i stubbled on this thread though was to try and find a way to sync a few folders on a real amiga.