I’ve been having problems with Dropbox lately, not updating all files. I still haven’t got to the bottom of that but last night I worked on a Python script down our studio and wanted to polish it up at home but hey presto! It wasn’t there in the Dropbox – just the old version I’d renamed. Now it could be a problem with using Mercurial and Dropbox like I did (details follow) but I think that this morning I’ve solved it, thanks to this post.
What I used to do: Python scripts in the Dropbox under version control with Mercurial.
Now: I have my scripts locally and push/pull to a Mercurial repository only in the Dropbox. This means that there are no actual scripts in the Dropbox, just the magic .hg files from which you can clone everything.
The happy ending was that after creating an independent clone of my python scripts from the Dropbox folder (using the hg clone --pull option), my script from last night was all there, just as it should be.
Lesson learned.