Technology for Academics

As my regular readers know, I’m a big fan of Dropbox (see this earlier post). Dropbox adds a new folder to your ‘My Documents’ folder called ‘My Dropbox.’ Let’s say that you’ve created a folder in ‘My Documents’ called ‘Important Committee.’ Inside that folder are several other folders. Let’s say one of them is called ‘Stuff to Share.’ You want to share this folder with your fellow committee members for coordinating the work of your committee. But you don’t want to move your entire committee folder to Dropbox, and you don’t want to pull that one subfolder out; you like to keep your files neatly organized in one place.

Enter Dropbox Folder Sync.

After it’s installed, and you tell it where your ‘My Dropbox’ folder is located, just right click on your ‘Stuff to Share’ folder and select ‘Sync with Dropbox.’ Dropbox Folder Sync will effectively move your ‘Stuff to Share’ folder to your ‘My Dropbox’ folder, white creating a shadow folder (called a symbolic link) at its original location in the ‘Important Committee’ folder. Add a file to ‘Stuff to Share’ in either location, and the file will immediately appear in the other location. Edit a file in one location, and the edited file will appear in the other location.

If you choose the 2.0 Beta version, you also get an unsync option. Right click on the folder that’s in its original location, and select ‘UnSync with Dropbox.’ The folder in ‘My Dropbox’ will be deleted, and all of that folder’s files will only, once again, reside in the original location.

How slick is that?