I'm trying out Ulysses for the nice, long trial period (thanks!) and am starting to feel like this is the tool between LaTeX and Pages that I have been hoping to find. However, absolutely foundational for me is being able to have everything sync via Dropbox (moving from home laptop to work computer seamlessly). I thought this was going fine, but then I encountered somewhat of an odd error yesterday (something about reverting to a previous saved version, or generally along those lines), which led me to these forums and some searches of older discussions. I now realize that I was probably not being cautious enough in thinking through how Ulysses saves these bundled Project files.

Here is my basic situation and needs, and maybe someone can chime in just to say whether my assumptions are correct:

I do not care about having automated, background backups running - I don't need to be able to roll back the versions to revive some text I may have subsequently deleted. I want to work on a project in U, hit save every few minutes as I work, stop working for the day at the office, go home and pick up where I left off on my laptop at home. If I turn off all of the automated backup settings on both copies of U (home and work), can I do what I just outlined?

Looking around, I realize that U isn't actually saving those backups to my dropbox folder anyway...so maybe this isn't an issue to begin with. Or, maybe *only* putting a Ulysses project inside a Dropbox folder isn't sufficient to capture all of the necessary bundled files? If so, do I need to put something else in Dropbox from U? Do I need to symlink something (like I've done for other apps)?

Searching these forums, I did not see these concerns addressed, but apologies in advance if I am asking something that has been dealt with before (or even routinely).

Ben

Niklas

Thanks for that - good to hear that you've had success with Dropbox.

So, to try to clarify on the issue of "automatic" or background saving, it seems like Ulysses is still running some kind of background "save" feature, *even if* I have disabled the "Backups" function in the Preferences? However, that constant "save" function isn't necessarily causing trouble with Dropbox (unless, of course, I were to have the same Project open on *both* computers at the same time...which would obviously be a bad idea)?

Ben

Well yes, automatic saving and backup are two different things. Backup is done at regular intervals (when opening and closing a project by default, I think) and should not cause any problems with dropbox, I presume, especially since the backups are by default stored outside the dropbox folder. Automatic saving is done constantly. Try it, just type something, close the project directly and reopen it. There you are... Almost like magic. This is a wonderful feature, I think, as you can concentrate on writing and never worry over losing your brilliant lines. I suspect that this *may* be a potential problem with Dropbox, but I don't really know. I guess the soulmen have to weigh in on that.

But again, I still haven't seen any problems...

I'm not sure I should revive an old thread, but it is relevant to the discussion:
Now that iDisk is going, I need something else, hence looking into Dropbox. (I also have Backblaze but like to spread my options!).

I understand that dropbox had concurrency problems, although perhaps rarely, and depending on work mode. Now:
1. Has dropbox made changes that changed the situation?
2. If not, would not making symlinks to ~/Dropbox solve the issue, because you're always working outside of Dropbox—i.e. offline working cannot really mess things up as the main file is outside ~/Dropbox ?

Unfortunately, I cannot then also symlink a second computer, but I must just keep running ChronoSync on both!