Dropbox

Continuing with my journey to replace publicly hosted cloud services with self-hosted solutions. One of the nice developments of the recent years are services like Dropbox or Google Drive, which really simplify some use cases. For example, in my own workflow I mainly use these services to a) synchronize unix configuration files, b) synchronize some random temp files I need on several computers or which I need from my phone (I am usually too lazy to get a cable), c) for easy sharing of photos or other files, and d) for synchronizing my Lightroom catalogue across devices, a quite heavy task because of the monolithic sqlite file with > 1 GB. There have only been a few cases where I actually used a shared folder for collaborative work. Computer scientists have better tools for such jobs. ;) So my need for something that is really accepted by many users is again questionable. Hence, I could easily search for a self-hosted solution without many drawbacks. ...

As I am working on a lot of different computer I wanted to share some of my configuration files across these computers to have similar working environments on all of the machines. An easy solution to do this is e.g. for git to put the .gitconfig file (along with other configuration files) into a folder inside the Dropbox (or other syncing tool), create a symlink to that file in the original location in your home directory and let Dropbox do the syncing. ...