Moving ebooks to and from your Android device and your computer

Why Dropbox?

For security reasons, nothing outside of an Android app is allowed access to data stored by the app. So we need the COW app itself to move copies of its own data into – and out of – the Android device.

Similarly, the COW app can’t have access to your computer. There has to be a place for the Android app to pass the files to your computer. That’s where Dropbox comes in.

How to set up Dropbox to connect your COW app to your desktop computer (Windows or Macintosh)

NOTE: If you are familiar with Dropbox, you might be tempted to move the ebooks manually yourself using the Dropbox app. Don’t do that! Let the Android app and your desktop app handle that for you. (Dropbox makes a secure folder that only Chess Openings Wizard can access. Trying to work around that by manually moving files does not go well.)

The Connect button is for starting the connection between the app and your Dropbox account. If it is the first time you’ve connected, this will guide you through logging in to your Dropbox account and allowing the app access to its folder.

The Disconnect button is for breaking the connection with Dropbox. This can be handy if for some reason the list of files in Dropbox is not updating. You can disconnect and then connect to start fresh.

The Forget button is for removing the connection between the app and your Dropbox account. Use this if you change Dropbox accounts for some reason.

The Upload and Download buttons are for starting the process of copying an ebook. The Upload button will copy the highlighted file on the Android to Dropbox. The Download button will copy the highlighted file in Dropbox to the Android.

The Delete button allows you to delete the highlighted file from the cloud. (Deleting ebooks from the Android is done from the menu.)

Press the Done button when you are done using Dropbox.

When a file is highlighted, the Size: and Created: fields will show the size of the file and the last time it was updated. This is handy if you must decide whether an ebook on your Android or in your Dropbox is larger (and therefore might have more analysis) or newer (and therefore might contain more recent edits).

The checkbox for “Overwrite the file in the cloud” controls whether uploading a file will replace any file with the same name. This box is checked by default as you’ll generally want to keep just one copy of an ebook synced between your iPad and your PC or Macintosh. If for some reason you want the uploaded ebook to be copied into the cloud but you don’t want to accidentally overwrite (replace) a file in the cloud with the same name, uncheck this box. Uploading will then create a slightly different file name for the uploaded ebook if there is one already in the cloud with the same name.


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