Mercurial (and, I guess Git) with Dropbox: any drawbacks?

Question

I have a Mercurial repository for a personal project, and I have been storing the master repository in my Dropbox for a few weeks now (something along this line; and I under

Answer 1

+1 for bitbucket. It's free, and you get a single private repo with that free account (unlike github).

The drawback with the dropbox only solution is that if you do screw something up in the repo on your machine, that screwup will be copied out to bitbucket and replicated to every other place you've got the dropbox installed. Dropbox is very quick, so you won't be able to stop it from happening in time to prevent issues.

You lose the ability to decouple making changes to your repository with publishing those changes.

I do use dropbox to host a couple of repositories that I use on both my home and work machines, but those aren't the only copies of those repositories. There's also a bitbucket repo (as well as other people that have clones of them).

Answer 2

I would not recommend using dropbox with mercurial, as I often see conflicted files between my Mac and Windows clients. Especially undo is affected, but I did experience conflicts with other files as well.

Regards Mirko

Answer 3

I am using it with Bazaar at the moment across 3 machines. However, I am the lone developer in any of the branches.

I used the init-repo --no-trees command to create the repository.

Answer 4

I've been using Dropbox with Hg too without experiencing a problem until now. Too late I realized hg doesn't report corruption during routine checkins, only when you try to use the repo for real (the worst of all situations, since you don't know something's broken until you really need it).

Its not clear whether if the corruption is spontaneous or caused by accessing the repository with Mac, Windows and Linux clients (I use all three at different times). But I've seen at least one case of corruption happening when only the Mac was active so it could well be Dropbox itself.

If you do decide to live dangerously, run "hg verify" (or "git verify" regularly to turn up any dirt.