Freelancer's Playground! Learn Programming, The Freelancer's Way

Remote Backup In Ubuntu Using Dropbox

Have you ever been in situation where, says, you want to work on some files, but the hard drive is broken? Or, you go on vacations or some remote location. You need to work on files on your PC, but you didn't brought the PC/laptop nor the data with you? I experienced this kind of situations.

At that time, I wish I have a copy of my files somewhere in the cloud that I can download it, make some modification, and upload it back. Then, I just have to re-sync my local copy with the latest update. Luckily, now we have so many online storage facility for that purposes. I myself use Dropbox for this.

To work with dropbox in ubuntu, all you have to do is, download the package and install it. Once installed, dropbox will setup a new per-user daemon, called dropboxd. This little piece of software will maintain syncing your dropbox directory.

Once you're done with configuration, you need to restart nautilus, or better yet, logout and login back. After that, all you have to do is, add documents into your dropbox directory (eg: $HOME/Dropbox) and dropboxd will automatically sync it to server. Also, it will sync the documents for every time you update it. If, for some reason you deleted the files and want it back, just go to dropbox site and restore it. See, how convenient it is.