You must be thinking that I’m going nuts (I wonder that myself!) by writing this. Let me assure you, this is not a conscious decision, just the observation of a fact. More and more, when writing papers with external collaborators, we end up sharing the paper using DropBox instead of setting a SVN repository for the paper.
I guess the two main reasons are simplicity (no need to create and manage user accounts for the external researchers) and extreme laziness (DropBox synchronizes the files automatically but with SVN you need to ask for the update yourself).
For sure, the merging algorithm in DropBox could be improved so you better avoid working on the same parts of the paper at the same time (already happened to me once that while working on a file, DropBox “synchronized me” and lost the changes; I learnt the hard way to pay more attention to DropBox warnings!).
Are you brave enough to confess that you are doing the same? Come out of the closet!
Now if I could only get collaborators to stop using Adobe to add comments …
I hate that soooo much!!!
Yep Jordi. Our whole lab switched to dropbox now. We are using it to write papers and grants. My boss payed for the corporate dropbox, so we have tons of space. In fact, all my work related files are in dropbox now, so I can share that with other people in the lab in a heartbeat. Very useful. It never happened to me that it synced while I was modifying a file, but that is a good warning.
Probably Dropbox issued a warning but with some many windows open is too easy to click enter without paying too much attention. I guess this is what happened…
Same here, dropbox is becoming THE way in our lab. Though to your adobe comment, which I fully agree, any alternative to handle comment exchanges when using different text editors, e.g. word and latex?
I´m afraid I’ve no cross-editor comment suggestion. Never happened to me this mixture of .doc and .tex for the same “project”
I’m a “old” dropbox user and I love it, but I think that the Dropbox Premium plans are very expensive. I’m trying Insync (https://www.insynchq.com) that is a very interesting alternative. Insync is very similar to Dropbox but it uses Google Docs storage that is only 0.25 $/GB/year (Insync is free, you only pay Google storage if you need more than 1GB). With Insync you can share files (like Dropbox) and ALSO edit documents in the cloud with Google docs (so you can avoid lose the changes when two or more users are editing at the same time).
I’m quite happy with http://teamdrive.com I’ve been told it’s really safe.
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