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Sunday, June 27, 2010

DropBox and My Documents

I've spent a big chunk of the day setting up a new Windows 7 laptop. Primarily to be used by my wife, Beth, but needing also to be accessible by me and our 3 kids. I thought I would take time to set up Dropbox, something I have read about but never actually used. I think I have it up and running, but there was a key modification I had to make. I really want Dropbox to be the default, like MyDocuments. But for the most part, Dropbox acts just like a folder in the file system; the key is that any file or folder placed within it will be synched to the cloud.

So what I really wanted to do was replace "My Documents" with "My Dropbox". Fortunately, in Windows "My Documents" is really just a label, that is applied by default to a folder User/Documents. So if you go into the Users list in Windows Explorer, and right-click on My Documents, you get a dialog which includes a Location tab. Within that Location tab, you can specify any arbitrary folder you want. So, change it to User/My Dropbox, and you are all set. (Note: This also requires not letting Dropbox default the location of My Dropbox--you have to tell it to put it as an immediate child of User.)

08/25/13 UPDATE: Unfortunately, this seems to break the built-in 1Password-Dropbox integration. 1Password is essentially "hard-coded" to expect Dropbox to be in the default location. Or at least it did a few months ago--I haven't checked since then.

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