Take the 2-minute tour ×

I could not google this one. I would like to use Dropbox or Google drive only as backup, so I would like to ensure I only upload to those services and never download (unless done manually via the web interface). There would be several of us uploading stuff to one account, so we would need to ensure we don't accidentaly delete something on another guy's machine by doing some changes on our local machine. Is there a simple way to do this automatically - i.e. by running a daemon that will upload eveyuthing in a given folder but never download anything?

I am on linux, so that complicates things a bit, but I am also interested in windows solutions.

share|improve this question
Is something like this likely to help? github.com/astrada/google-drive-ocamlfuse - was thinking you could mount to a folder then use RSync to backup your files to it? –  sgtbeano Nov 12 '13 at 12:02
That would work for me but I am afraid it is too technical for the others. But it is useful to know,thanks. –  sup Nov 12 '13 at 12:03
The official Google Drive and Dropbox clients both are designed to do 2-way synchronization. If you were to write your own client what you want could be acomplished. –  Ramhound Nov 12 '13 at 12:06
Well, that would be too much work for too little benefit :-). –  sup Nov 12 '13 at 14:00

2 Answers 2

up vote 2 down vote accepted

Why not all use a dedicated user-directory within Dropbox. That way the changes from another user will be updated in your Dropbox (but in a directory you normally don't use). You could also use different accounts per user and share a common directory. Like Luke would have a share-luke and would share that folder with all other users, Sup would have share-sup and share that with the others, etc...

If you all work with the same files you need to find another solution because even if you could block downloads, you wouldn't have the correct version of a file on the Dropbox server if you overwrite and upload (while it is a file of another user). And that's not much of a backup, is it?

BTW. Limiting permission on a share in Dropbox (what you actually want) is on the roadmap. When this is available and you followed my suggestion to share folders among each other, you could revoke the write-permissions for the other users and you've got exactly what you want.

share|improve this answer
I think we will do with the separate directory for each of us until they implement directory permissions. Thanks for the answer! (it is partly a backup and partly a sharing solution - we need to see files of other people but we edit them only rarely) –  sup Nov 12 '13 at 16:07

You can do this according to a blog post at cloud-hq.net . If you read the post you can see how it's done.

share|improve this answer
Thanks, but coud-hq seems to be pay only after trial and it is too expensive for me. But if I really needed this, this seems that it would work. –  sup Apr 18 at 7:28

Your Answer


