I’ve been using an application called Writerside to create the documentation for LightWave. It’s great. It uses a coding language called Markdown to do things like bold text, inserting images, or creating other page furniture. You can do this without needing to use a mouse, which speeds things up immensely. It has also introduced me to using coding terms, like commits; pushes; branching and fetching, using Github. I’ve used Dropbox pretty much since the start, back in 2009, and I have a 2 TB standard account. It has been the backup for my work since I started earning my living writing the LightWave documentation, first as a PDF using InDesign (going back to my early days as a magazine editor), then as a wiki using Confluence and now Writerside. I’ve always put my work in a folder that Dropbox will silently back up in real-time. Now it’s becoming problematic, because that real-time nature means it interferes with the working of Writerside and Github.
The trick is now to exclude my 17 GB Writerside folder from syncing with Dropbox. You can find lots on how to resolve problems when Dropbox __isn’t__ syncing folders, but the reverse took a bit longer. I did eventually find the solution in the Dropbox docs (always RTFM), but it’s a bit abstruse. You can’t just use the mouse, you need to use Windows’ Powershell, which isn’t installed by default. When you’ve got it, open up it up and type:
Set-Content -Path 'X:\Dropbox\Library\Documents\writerside' -Stream com.dropbox.ignored -Value 1To start syncing a folder again use:
Clear-Content -Path 'X:\Dropbox\Library\Documents\writerside' -Stream com.dropbox.ignoredObviously, you’ll need to set the path correctly for your needs. After a bit, if you refresh the folder concerned, you should see that the little green tick to show something is backed up to Dropbox is gone:
I’m using the excellent Directory Opus instead of Windows’ own file explorer, so your look might vary.
PS. I just noticed that I wrote:
when Dropbox __isn’t__ syncing folders
that’s Markdown in action, which WordPress doesn’t seem to support, at least not at my tier. Normally, the underscores make the surrounded text italic.
__just testing to see if the WordPress plugin **JetPack** will do Markdown formatting__. It doesn’t seem so at my tier.
Aha! It seems I can create Markdown texts by using a specific block, not the standard Paragraph.
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Syncthing might be worth looking at sometime, if you haven’t already. Also abstruse, but it’s a little extra peace of mind for backups. And a bonus: the name evokes memories of the original Annoying Thing from Erik W, before the ad men tortured it!
That actually looks really good. I do use Dropbox to keep stuff for my phone, too, and I didn’t see an Android version at first glance. It seems there are a couple of apps for it, which is cool. The main advantage of DB is that it’s instant offsite backup, whereas syncthing requires me to have the storage myself. I’ve never been good at doing my own backups, leading to many disasters and rebirths over the decades I’ve used computers