So You Use Dropbox For Version Control You're Awesome
If you follow my blog, or are even a casual visitor you know at least 2 tools I use everyday. Codeigniter and Git. I use them for lots of reasons, but most of all because they make my life and the team I work with easier. Moving forward. One thing that I’m constantly doing is trying to improve my foo while using these two tools. Usually I’m on IRC talking with other developers that have the same interests, or just sharing lolcats. But every now and then, a guy shows up while we’re talking about Git and version control. I’m talking about a regular developer, a well intentioned one, that also wants to learn new stuff. But then he says the following:
Version control? pff who needs to learn all those commands when I have Dropbox?
Dear developer that uses Dropbox for version control, I have questions! (I’m also going to post the normal answers I got while asking this)
**Q: **How the hell does that even work?
A: “I just work inside my dropbox folder” or “I pointed dropbox to be my local server”.
Q: If by a remote chance you have to work with someone else other than yourself, how does that work?
A: “I work alone I don’t have to worry about that”.
Q: Do you work on your projects inside dropbox? If so, every time you save a file a new version is created in the “Dropbox History”, how do you find that save if you want to rollback?
A: “Well I normally just look at a date interval. I know that my change is somewhere between date X and Y”.
Q: What do you do if you want to experiment new things on your project without damaging the work already done?
A: “I copy the entire project to another folder obviously”.
And after that last answer I normally have a minor stroke and get back to watching lolcats.
Seriously people, using dropbox like that is just wrong. There’s no other way to look at it. If that makes you happy, keep doing it. Just don’t say it’s awesome. And most of all, don’t call it version control.
Have fun.
ps: Also check this link to see how serious people about using this method.