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Dropbox and Drupal

Mon, 17/10/2011 - 21:31 — maartendeblock

Dropbox is a handy program to help you backup and share files. During the installation you choose a location for your Dropbox folder. Everytime you put a file in this folder, it is automatically synchronised with the Dropbox servers. 

It is available on Windows, Mac and Linux.

Backup

If something goes wrong with your computer (hard disk crash, virus, fire, ...) or your laptop is stolen, then you can easely get back all your important files.

You get 2GB of space for free. In most cases this is enough to backup the most important documents. If you want to backup pictures and home video's as well, you can upgrade your account to a paying version.

A lot of data or a lot of files don't have a big impact on the speed of your computer. I myself have over 30GB of data in 37.000 files in my Dropbox. It takes less than a minute for Dropbox to know if everything is up to date. In the meantime, I can just continue to work with my files.

Sharing

It is also possible to share files with other people. This can be done in 2 ways. Or you put your files in the automatic 'Public' folder where everyone can access them. Or you can share any other folder with specific people. These files are not publicly available, only you and the people you invited have access.

Offline available

You don't have te be online to access your files. You can keep working with them while you are offline. As soon as you are online again, all changes are synchronised. If you changed a file in a shared folder, and at the same time someone else changed the same file, a copy is made. That way nothing ever gets lost.

Drupal

Dropbox has an API. With this API modules can be developed.

A first module is the 'Backup and Migrate Dropbox' module. It adds a Dropbox destination to the 'Backup and Migrate' module where you can send the backups. If your backups runs at night, it will automaticly be synchronised with your computer as soon as you startup in the morning.

A second module is the 'Dropbox Integration' module. With this you can let visitors of you website upload files directly to your Dropbox folder. It is possible to limit the size and the quantity the visitors can send to prevent someone spamming your folder full.

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