DropBox Syncing

Here’s a quick tip on syncing your DropBox files. DropBox is an amazingly useful cloud hosting system in which to save your files. If, like me, you run your own business and need to work in the office by day but continue working from home, then your only options used to be to either email the files to yourself to continue at home, save them and then email them back again afterwards, or to just carry a laptop back and forth. Neither of these were great options.

 

But then DropBox came along and made multi location working incredibly easy. There was however one recurring issue that I could never quite figure out. The numerous duplicate conflict files that were being created on certain files. This can be a problem if the is a small piece of information that has been omitted from the sync and you don’t notice until six months later your accountant is asking why that data is missing..

 

Recently however I finally realised the cause of these conflict files. If you are a Mac user then these days you can simply shut down your computer and the system will close all of the open applications for you very quickly and if there are any files that require saving it will open a prompt to ask you if you want to save them. Very efficient. However I wasn’t taking into account that DropBox requires some time to then sync up those files in the cloud. With large design files this can sometimes take a couple of minutes. But the system shut down procedure does not take this DropBox function into account and just goes ahead and shuts down before the task is complete.

 

So my tip is to shut down each application one at a time, save your work and then spare a few minutes to wait for DropBox to complete its synchronisation before shutting down your computer.