Dropbox is not a tool for developers

I talked with a group that was using Dropbox as their "VCS" before and asked how they handled conflicts. They told me they just made sure everybody was in the same room before anybody did anything.

[1] I'm not saying this because git is the magic fairy dust. Replace git with hg, darcs etc.

Note that I've been using DB successfully as an up-to-the-minute backup since it came out - it's only in the last week I've had problems bad enough to go back to my weekly backups.

Edit: actually it looks like most people use a bare repo on dropbox so you still push/pull from it. I don't understand the use-case at all then.

I use git daily but I also use a syncing program (first Live Mesh, then Dropbox, now Google Drive) to sync my source code directories. This isn't at all for version control but rather so I can change systems nearly instantly without having to check everything in to a remote git server. This allows me to not care if I'm working on one of my two laptops or my desktop, all my code is Just There whenever I need to switch. With a pure git solution I'd have to push changes that may or may not be a fully coherent change set each time I switched machines.

Anyway, my point is that all of the OP's arguments are still valid when you are using git+dropbox, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to expect to do.

FWIW, all of the major sync systems have issues here (my biggest pet peeve with Live Mesh was that it would hold locks on files for an abnormally long time which would stop me from being able to compile while .o files were being synced, for example). But Dropbox's probably are the most annoying since you have so little control over what does and doesn't sync beyond the root sync directory.