3 ms·
The one thing that Dropbox fails on, together with just about every other version control system, is that novice users (or your business-type cofounders), easil
by joelhaasnoot 16y ago
The one thing that Dropbox fails on, together with just about every other version control system, is that novice users (or your business-type cofounders), easily create conflicts with Word, Excel and other files.
There's no easy way to handle it, but the current way is very annoying at best. Most of the time I guess it, and delete the one I think is wrong, but one day that will lead to the loss of some important changes.
It's hard to merge every type of document, but atleast give me the best info, or a list of conflicts: who created it, when the versions were each last edited, file sizes, etc. Often a user will edit an old copy of the file and wreak havoc.
Finally, dropbox syncs _everytime_ I view an Office document. Must be Word's fault, but it's annoying.
- patio11 16y agoThankfully, if you ever blow away something important, Dropbox gives you an undo. (Create a file, let it sync, delete it, then go check their website.)
- joelhaasnoot 16y agoTrue, however in a fast moving environment, that's only of little consolation if I have to look back 10 days and 20 versions to find the missing content. It becomes a trade off: do I do the work again or aim for the perfect merge. Unfortunately, the first often wins.
- adambourg 16y ago... Use Google docs.
- joelhaasnoot 16y agoTrue, but the formatting options aren't very good. I know, I'm picky, but it just doesn't cut it. It works, but isn't perfect.
- ddlatham 16y agoDo deleted revisions count against your quota?
- cletus 16y agoWhile I don't agree with you that version control doesn't work well for Word, Excel, etc, I'd say the problem there is the format isn't built for version control. VC works great for source code because it's all line based with (either by convention or required by the grammar) one statement per line. Diffing is pretty trivial in these cases and meaningful. Binary formats are a whole different ballgame. Even XML-based formats are problematic. My view is that XML documents require a VCS built specifically for diffing that kind of data as line based will run a lot of false positives with white-space. As another commentor said: you can always get your stuff back with Dropbox. I'm not sure how much better you can do than this without actually changing the program that created the data.
- joelhaasnoot 16y agoTrue, perfect merging doesn't exist. I just think that replacing one file with two files that have different names isn't the best solution to letting me deal with the problem.
- jessriedel 16y agoWell, obviously we want some copy (hopefully, the best copy) of the file to be available at its original name without having to use a Dropbox client or visit the Dropbox website. So I guess what you're looking for is an additional interface (website or client) which would allow easy choosing or even diffing following a conflict? I'd certainly support that, as I've had to diff myself in the past.
- sreitshamer 16y agoFrom what I've been told, Office docs are made up of objects accessible via an API. So theoretically one could build a version control tool that works effectively for Office docs.
- Groxx 16y agoTheoretically. There are .NET interop assemblies[1], for working with Office documents, and they require Office to be installed to work. Outside of that, you're stuck rolling your own Office-document-parser. There is a built-in "track changes" mechanism, though I don't know if all Office types handle it. Word does, at least. Though that's pretty basic. [1]: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vsto/dd183191.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vsto/dd183191.aspx
- Groxx 16y agoDropbox syncs every time you view an Office document because Office creates hidden lock files every time you open something in not-read-only mode. It's synchronizing the lock file, which is designed precisely to prevent conflicts. I'd like a local-conflict view, yes. They do actually exist on your machine (in a hidden folder inside your Dropbox folder), Dropbox downloads all conflicts all the time. I ran across this behavior when I caused a conflict in my work TrueCrypt file - pulling a gig took a while. But the web interface is almost entirely useless for comparing such a file, or any file metadata conflicts, because you need to open it to examine the contents.