Dropbox beta includes some sweet new features

Posted on Tuesday, August 31, 2010 @ 11:16 CET

I absolutely love Dropbox. Its such a fantastic service, that in case you're not familiar with it, runs in the background and seamlessly syncs your folders with their servers so you always have a backup. On top of that you can share folders (or others can share with you) which makes working with others really easy, without having to resort to things like source control. They also have clients for Mac, Windows, Linux, iPhone, iPad, Android and Blackberry (coming soon). Amazing.

However one of my main gripes with it is that it creates a Dropbox folder in your home directory and absolutely everything within that folder gets synced. Stupid simple, but I sometimes had files or folders I didn't really want to sync either because they're already in source control or its a folder with tons of heavy assets that put a real dent into my 50GB account limit.

The other was that I couldn't stop it when I was on a slow connection like a 3G data card - your only option was to kill the app.

Turns out I'm not alone! People asked and the friendly folks at Dropbox delivered. From version 0.8.91 onwards you can do both of these things. When you click on the icon in the menu bar you'll be presented with the option to pause, like so:

The great thing with this is that it continues to index the files on your machine so it knows what to sync once you resume syncing. Under the advanced tab you now also have the option to do a "Selective sync" where you can uncheck folders from being synced. Awesome! You'll also notice new icons in the Finder.

The latest beta version (at the time of this post) is 0.8.97 can be downloaded here, and includes all these goodies. If upgrading from an earlier version it might take a little while to upgrade the database at first but its worth it.

- paulo

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