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Dropbox will kill your insane MacBook Air 2013 battery

blog.nicoschuele.com

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Re: Dropbox will kill your insane MacBook Air 2013 battery

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for pointing this out. It's a typo, I meant mA, not mAh. Fixed.

No, that is not a typo. Thos is a typo - an error created during the mechanical act of typing. Yours was just a plain mistake, you got the units wrong. Own it and learn from the error instead of excusing it away.

I guess you might not be as good with words in Schwizerdütsch as he is in English.

Re: Dropbox will kill your insane MacBook Air 2013 battery

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for pointing this out. It's a typo, I meant mA, not mAh. Fixed.

No, that is not a typo. Thos is a typo - an error created during the mechanical act of typing. Yours was just a plain mistake, you got the units wrong. Own it and learn from the error instead of excusing it away.

I didn't see the article before fixes, but I seem to often type "driver" instead of "drive". If one typed "mAh" enough, don't you think a similar thing could happen?

Re: Dropbox will kill your insane MacBook Air 2013 battery

#93
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And to everyone that says you should not store code in dropbox: a) there are good and legitimate reasons for doing so I'm genuinely curious: why do this, as opposed to using a DVCS like git?

My entire work folder is inside my Dropbox. Most of those projects are under Git version control, other temporary folders, toy projects and bits and bobs are not. This way my work folder is nominally backed up and synced across my machines. I wouldn't advocate using Dropbox as the only/primary backup and version control for important projects, but its totally legitimate to have code inside of a Dropbox.

My point exactly.

Re: Dropbox will kill your insane MacBook Air 2013 battery

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that is not a typo. Thos is a typo - an error created during the mechanical act of typing. Yours was just a plain mistake, you got the units wrong. Own it and learn from the error instead of excusing it away.

I guess you might not be as good with words in Schwizerdütsch as he is in English.

Lol. Thanks. But I'm from the french-speaking part of the country.

Re: Dropbox will kill your insane MacBook Air 2013 battery

#95
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My computer comes to a halt on boot because of the Dropbox client. I hate it. For some reason SugarSync does not do this kind of thing, so there has to be a way to do it in a smarter way. Why can't Dropbox remember the state of the files in your dropbox folder, and upon login, grab state of the files on the Dropbox server and do a simple comparison, without re-calculating hashes for the files on your computer?

Your files may have changed between logins (multi-user system, multi-OS system, etc.).

In that case, you can look at the modified date first. Better than re-calculating hashes.

I guess the methods I propose will not guarantee proper syncing if for some reason a file has changed but the metadata hasn't...

Re: Dropbox will kill your insane MacBook Air 2013 battery

#97
post #81
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand. You can easily cut a branch commit. Push the branch. Pull the branch finish it. Commit. (optionally rebase). Delete the temporary branch. Git handles this problem very well.

Right. I get a call, I need to leave for a meeting in 5 minutes. This is exactly the time when I want to cut branch commits, push branches, pull branches, commit and rebase. Even rsync is better than that. Put it another way, I don't understand why you'd use Dropbox at all, after all you could easily version all your files in git, using push/pull/branch/commit/rebase to get your data to your different machines. Git h…

I don't use dropbox at all? To me it is a great solution for consumers but my needs are different. I use git + standard unix tools. For backup I use tarsnap. It rocks.

Re: Dropbox will kill your insane MacBook Air 2013 battery

#98
post #81
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand. You can easily cut a branch commit. Push the branch. Pull the branch finish it. Commit. (optionally rebase). Delete the temporary branch. Git handles this problem very well.

Right. I get a call, I need to leave for a meeting in 5 minutes. This is exactly the time when I want to cut branch commits, push branches, pull branches, commit and rebase. Even rsync is better than that. Put it another way, I don't understand why you'd use Dropbox at all, after all you could easily version all your files in git, using push/pull/branch/commit/rebase to get your data to your different machines. Git h…

The specific problem with git in Dropbox is that working in git can cause a large number of transient files changes as you, for example, switch branches. Dropbox doesn't know those are transient changes and attempts to sync all of them. That is one reason it can drain battery so fast.

Obviously with regular files, that is not an issue, so Dropbox works well. (unless you're managing them with git, I guess)

If you're willing to accept the "lightness" of git branching and commits, it's possible to "save and sync" your work very quickly. Assuming you're on a dev branch:

git add -A

git commit -m "temp commit 2013-7-3"

git push origin

You can even script this, see for example:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8482843/git-commit-bash-s...

Then when you're ready to work on a different machine, you fetch from origin.

If you want to keep your commits meaningful on your dev branch, you can create a temp branch first, then rebase later to get rid of the ugly temp commit.

git checkout -b temp123

Re: Dropbox will kill your insane MacBook Air 2013 battery

#99

Oh if only it was one App that killed the battery on the last laptop I bought. Before nuking the default windows install, I did a quick test, with all the crapware that comes as standard, it managed about 4 hours. Fresh install 6.5 hours.

Mac. Doesn't come with crapware. For Windows boxes, there's decrapifier.

Doesn't Windows 8 come with a built-in "remove everything and fresh install the OS" button now? Can always use that.

Re: Dropbox will kill your insane MacBook Air 2013 battery

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that is not a typo. Thos is a typo - an error created during the mechanical act of typing. Yours was just a plain mistake, you got the units wrong. Own it and learn from the error instead of excusing it away.

I guess you might not be as good with words in Schwizerdütsch as he is in English.

Probably not, but I reckon my French would give his English a run for its money :P
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