title: Using cron job copying to avoid dangers of github + dropbox?
body: <p>This is one for all the folks who truly grok version control.  </p>
  
  <p>So there's a bunch of people out there saying "if you put a github-managed repo in a dropbox folder, your world will end."  Dave Winer, for example, <a href="http://scripting.com/2014/01/24/githubAndDropboxDoNotPlayWellTogether.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">reports unspecified disastrous results</a>.  <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1960799/using-git-and-dropbox-together-effectively/5851299#5851299">This SO answer</a> suggests that dropbox has the potential of corrupting git repos wherever hosted because of cross-OS encoding problems, <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2199637/is-it-possible-to-host-a-bare-git-repository-using-dropbox-to-share-code">various answers here</a> report or speculate about numerous problems, there's a comment on <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16765728/is-it-okay-to-keep-local-repos-on-dropbox-without-remote-repo">this SO</a> with similar warnings, everyone answering <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18818257/should-i-keep-my-git-folder-outside-dropbox">here</a> agrees, also <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1964347/mercurial-and-i-guess-git-with-dropbox-any-drawbacks/1967038#1967038">here</a>, <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29983646/how-do-i-keep-git-repositories-inside-dropbox">here</a> etc.</p>
  
  <p>Here's the thing.  I really really want to use github and dropbox together anyway, and for one simple reason: dropbox is my first-level backup solution.  (Not my only backup solution, of course, but my first level one.)  If I suffer a hard drive crash, I'm confident that I could get everything I truly need right off dropbox... everything, that is, except stuff under git version control, which I push to github.  </p>
  
  <p>So, it strikes me that there's a really easy way around the risks that everyone else has identified, one that presumably doesn't bear any risks of repo corruption.  Run a cron job (on, in my case, a mac, but I assume this would work equally well under linux, a vanilla bsd, etc), like nightly or even hourly, that just copies everything in folders holding repos under git to a dropbox folder and cleans up the previous version.  </p>
  
  <p>I <em>assume</em> that this wouldn't pose any danger to the underlying git repos, because I <em>assume</em> that whatever dark magic git does when it watches files for changes isn't also watching for files to be copied elsewhere.  But I don't have any actual evidence for that assumption, because my git-fu isn't anywhere near where it needs to be. (Hence my characterization of the thing as "dark magic.")  </p>
  
  <p>But you, dear reader, have git-fu far more advanced than I do, and can tell me: would this kind of maneuver successfully keep anything dropbox does to the copied files from interfering with what git does to the files in the original locations?</p>