15 Hacks Every Dropbox User Should Know

Posted 12/09/2009 at 10:00am | by Alex Castle and Norman Chan

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Sync Your IM Chatlogs

A lot of people use instant messaging to keep in touch with their coworkers during the day. We certainly do here at the Maximum PC office, but we’re sure the same can be said for many less-technically-forward offices as well. Because of that it sometimes comes up that while you’re at home you want to remember something from a conversation you had while you were at work, but you can’t, because your IM logs are stored on your work computer.

That doesn’t have to be the case, though. If you use Pidgin, a free, open source multi-protocol IM client, you can tell it to save its logs in a folder in your Dropbox. As long as Pidgin is set up that way on all of your computers, they will all share access to the same logs.

Actually setting it up so that Pidgin saves your logs somewhere other than the default location is a little trickier than you might imagine, though. You’ll need to change the PURPLEHOME environment variable on your system, which defines where Pidgin will save its configuration files and logs. To do this, open the control panel and select System. Then select the Advanced tab, and click on Environment Variables. Now, click New under the System Variables box. In the Variable Name field, enter PURPLEHOME and in the Variable Value field, enter the location of your Dropbox folder. Now Pidgin will use a folder inside your Dropbox called .purple to save its data.

If you’re ok working from a fresh install of Pidgin, that's all you’ll need to do. If you have existing settings and logs that you want to keep using, just copy the .purple folder from its default directory (Application Data) to your Dropbox directory.

Host Your Music Collection in the Cloud

Tired of having to juggle your music collection between your desktop and laptop computer? Want to be able to access your music from anywhere, on any computer, but don’t want to (or don’t have the cash to) set up a streaming media server? Consider setting up a $9.99/month Pro50 account to host your favorite music.

With your MP3 files and iTunes library.xml file backed up to Dropbox, you can keep multiple computers running perfectly in-sync music collections. Add music on one computer, and it’ll be available on each other computer as well. Just be sure not to make changes on more than one computer at a time.

To tell each instance of iTunes to use the library file located in your Dropbox, just hold shift while launching the program. A dialog box will come up prompting you to choose a new library file.

If you’re using a friends computer, or another computer that you don’t want to keep your whole collection on at once, you can use the Dropbox web interface to download just the files you want to listen to at one time. Just visit dropbox.com, navigate through your collection, put a checkmark next to the files you want to listen to (or next to a folder, if you want to download a whole album at once) and then select Download from the More actions tab.

Keep Firefox Settings Synched Across Multiple Computers

For people who regularly use more than one computer, it can be a pain to switch back and forth between two browsers. Sure, applications and extensions like Xmarks can keep your bookmarks in sync for you, but what about your extensions and your history. Fortunately, you can use Dropbox to keep two Firefox installations totally in sync.

"But wait!" I hear you saying "you can't choose where Firefox saves its data!" Thats true, but there are ways to work around this. You can us Mklink, as discussed earlier, but there’s also an easier solution specific to Firefox: use Firefox Portable.

Firefox Portable is an app that's meant to run from anywhere, such as from a portable USB thumbdrive. In order to do this, a portable app has to be entirely self-contained, not storing any data anywhere else on your system. That means that if you get Portable Firefox and install it into your Dropbox, you'll have a full-featured browser that syncs and backs up all your data in the cloud.

Incidentally, this trick also works well for any portable app that you might want to have available at a moment’s notice.