Razvan (author) here. I created an app to sync any folder with Dropbox. It currently works on Windows. Haven't finished the website yet, just the app.
A little background on the app: I wanted to backup my external drives to Dropbox for a while and tried using symlinks but those don't work for that. If you remove the external drive, all your files will get deleted from Dropbox. Also, you need to restart Dropbox if you make changes to the folders on the external drive. Otherwise, they won't be synced.
I talked to my twin brother about this and he suggested building an app for that. Having a background in Windows internals we decided to go ahead and build it. We wanted to solve that in an elegant and effortless way, something even our parents (who are not tech savvy) could use.
So here is Boxifier, a Windows app which installs on top of Dropbox and lets you right click any folder and sync it to Dropbox.
I would really appreciate any feedback you might have. Thanks, Razvan
1) I have the impression that a lot of people want to share, say, git folders, so there may actually be a huge demand for file exclusions (I think there is a mac app for that, but nothing in windows). 2) Can I pick where in dropbox will this be synced to? When you have 100s of GBs (or dropbox for business accounts), your root DB folder can get very polluted, so linking to subfolders can be useful.
Thanks again!
2) For now folders sync as subfolders of the Dropbox\Boxifier folder, but we've been receiving this feature request so that you can pick where your outside folders will be synced in Dropbox. This is also on our roadmap.
Is there a way to exclude some files? Or can one be added? E.G. i tend to have a "tmp" subfolder that I want to exclude; or maybe exclude some file extensions? (kinda like .gitignore does?)
Not for now, but we're working on a solution for this. I'll let you know when it is available.
Boxifier monitors those folders for changes, aggregates the changes and then passes them to the Dropbox client through the virtualization layer.
Boxifier is a third party application.
Some people are not comfortable giving third party applications access to their Dropbox account.
That’s why when building Boxifier we made an effort to make it work without needing access to your Dropbox account.
This way you can try Boxifier with no worries.
We also sleep better at night because of that.
We could have built Boxifier so that it requires you to login into Dropbox and get back an access token to be used by Boxifier with the Dropbox API.
If someone wanted to get access to the data in your Dropbox account, they could do that with an access token (that they received when you authorized their app to access your Dropbox). Then they could use that token from any computer to download data from your Dropbox, without you ever finding out about it.
Boxifier works completely offline so it doesn't need any network access (which could be misused). If you want to be 101% sure you can setup a firewall rule and block all network access for Boxifier. This way you can make sure it cannot get data from your Dropbox folder and upload it to a remote location.
On the other hand, with an access token you have no control on how it is used outside of your computer. You may argue that you can always revoke it, but the reality of today's attacks is that they go stealth for a long time before you find out about them.
We used to work in the antivirus industry so that's why we care so much about security and privacy. Boxifier has been designed with security in mind from its early days.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_privilege
I need a solution to use all the 1TB of Dropbox space available without having to have 1TB of space on my laptop and without having to resort to use the web interface.
Nice product though.
Great job! This is a much feature in Dropbox. Would be awesome if it worked on Macs.
We've also set a high quality bar for us with 30 minutes. If the product doesn't deliver on its promise in 30 minutes then it means we need to do better.
We chose the 30 minutes instead of making the product a 7-day or 14-day or 30-day trial because we prefer freemium to software trials. With a number of days for you to try the software you can for instance install on day 1, go to a business trip on day 2 and when you return on day 7 realize that the software expired and you didn't even get the chance to try it out. With the attention economy of today, we believe day-based software trials are broken.
With Boxifier, if you don't find the time today you can try out the premium features again tomorrow, next week or whenever you find some free time because the product never expires.
2) If the target of the symlink is not available/not found then Dropbox will delete the contents of that folder from your account. This is the case for instance with removable drives. With Boxifier, ejecting the USB drive doesn't cause the contents to be deleted from your Dropbox account.
3) If you use selective sync with a symlink, the contents of the target folder willl be deleted you uncheck the folder from the selective sync settings dialog. With Boxifier, this doesn't happen because it has built-in support for this scenario. The folder just gets marked internally as inactive.
4) Symlinked folders lack the Dropbox overlay icons (green checkmarks, blue circles) so you can't get an idea of what the sync progress on those folders is. With Boxifier you have full Explorer integration so that you get the same experience as with the Dropbox folder.
5) Symlinked folders lack the Dropbox context menu functionality. With Boxifier you get the full Dropbox context menu functionality so you can easily share files, get public links, see previous versions or see them on Dropbox.com
6) A person who is not tech savvy will probably have a hard time understanding how to use symlinks and all their shortcomings. With Boxifier you simply right-click a folder to sync it with Dropbox. No need to be a computer wizard.