The other offers a single snapshot copy of the original, with no future updates in either direction.

One outcome offers continuous future updates. The Dropbox user interface uses that one little word to describe two completely different outcomes that it can deliver.

The crux of the confusion is one, little, word: What I’ve learned is that Dropbox is working fine, but some aspects of the Dropbox user interface, specifically some confusing terminology, makes it easy to think you’re doing it right, when you’re actually just… doing it wrong. In the hope of saving others the same grief, I’ve written down, here, what I’ve learned today. I did some experimentation, and I figured it out. I know this works for my other folders, so why isn’t this new folder, that another member of my team created and shared, working for me (or the rest of our workgroup?)įast forward to today, when I was setting up Dropbox on a new computer under a new account here at my office, and I managed to accidentally create the same issue – the new account wasn’t seeing updates to a shared folder that a number of us are otherwise using fine (and have been for months). However, further updates still just… didn’t appear. All the new files then turned up in a fresh copy of the folder with a different version number. We had got this wrong, but it didn’t look wrong. Key files we needed for meetings didn’t appear for others. We got all the original files shared around, but over the coming weeks the complaints began. Brilliant.Ī few months ago, I started using Dropbox with a new group of people I’m working with, and to facilitate that process, we set up a new Dropbox folder and shared it around.Īt least, thats what we thought we had done, but it just didn’t work. I’ve had a folder set shared across all my various Macs and IOS devices for ages, and I’ve had another folder shared with some colleagues for months – all working perfectly, with file updates from any of us turning up for everyone else. Nothing looked wrong, but updates to the original files we’d shared around never appeared.

I use it a lot, and I rely on it a lot.īut I had a real problem with it – sharing a folder with a new work group lately just wouldn’t work. Dropbox ( ) is an amazingly useful product.

Sending a dropbox link