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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-26T08:16:14+00:00

I currently use Dropbox as my backup solution for source and resources – and

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I currently use Dropbox as my “backup” solution for source and resources – and it’s fine and dandy and has saved my bacon many times.

I find myself in need of a proper version control system now tho – and I really don’t want to put a repository INSIDE my Dropbox folder.

For one thing, it will fill my Dropbox allowance pretty quickly – for another, I don’t really want Dropbox and the version-control software ‘fighting’ over files.

So I’m thinking of doing something like this (I’m using Mercurial but I’m sure the same theory applies to other VC stuff)

MYDOCS Folder <-- this is where the repo will go
    .hg (for Mercurial in this case)
    DROPBOX Folder
        WORK FOLDER
            PROJECT1
            PROJECT2
            PROJECT3
            ...

That way, everything I work on is covered by Dropbox – but my version control is outside of Dropbox.

Obviously not every file in my DROPBOX folder is version controlled – and I’m stuck with only 1 Repository for ALL my work (not ideal) but can anyone see any other snags with this approach?

Note: MYDOCS is backed-up separately (much less often) so there’s no risk of file loss here.

p.s.

I spent a bit of time over the weekend implementing this (using Mercurial/TortoiseHG) and it seems to work quite well.

There are some snags – you have to set aggressive ignore filters (in the end I just used “*” and added code manually) otherwise TortoiseHG has a heart-attack staring at 10s of 1000s of files every time it looks for changes/new files to add.

This means it won’t spot new files in existing projects too which is a minor pain-in-the-neck – it would be great if Mercurial actually had an INCLUDE filter at times like this…

p.p.s. I had a bright idea to make this a BIT easier.

I created a new folder outside the Dropbox called “Repo” and inside that I created a Directory Junction (link for you *nix types) to the directory inside my Dropbox which contains all my source (my Eclipse Workspace directory – basically).

I then put my repo into the ‘repo’ folder – that way it’s not overseeing my entire Dropbox, just the part of it I want it to – and it’s still not ‘inside’ my Dropbox 😉

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  1. Editorial Team

    As you point out, the major drawback of this approach is that you’re tied to a single repository. One of the big advantages of distributed version control systems like Mercurial is that repositories are cheap to create and use for isolated little projects.

    Why not just use bitbucket.org for your version control needs? You can create as many private repositories as you want and use as much disk as you want. The only drawback here is that you’re limited to how many users you can share them with, but given the approach you outlined above, that doesn’t seem to be a problem.

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