SFTP + Dropbox

Dropbox is a fantastic service for syncing documents. In fact, some form of digital syncing is now pretty much built into my workflow that I struggle to use an electronic device with out it! It allows me to keep my eBooks up to date (thanks to Calibre), allows me to sync my Zotero library of academic papers and generally keep my laptop and desktop in sync.

However, whilst Dropbox works amazingly at home, perhaps understandably there are times where it’s blocked. In this instance, I’m forced to either manually copy files to and from Dropbox or use a service that links into Dropbox.

I was getting fed up of that so I decided to bite the bullet and setup a node on Digital Ocean, solely for running Dropbox and allowing me to access files via SFTP instead. SFTP is built into a lot of apps I use, and I can happily use Syncback Pro to access the SFTP files and sync between my machine and the server. Dropbox runs on the Linux server as a command line quite happily.

I can set Syncback to run at a certain time each day or every few minutes if I wanted, including shutdown and startup. Whilst not quite as instantaneous as Dropbox, it at least offers a solution that replicates the Dropbox function and ties nicely.

Downside, is that obviously this is costing me $5 a month in fees for Digital Ocean. However, I consider this price to be worth it - after all, I now have decent syncing capability when needed and the additional perk of having a full Linux server running should I require it for anything.