Problem :
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.
Solution :
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.
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.