Dropbox
Dropbox Help for Windows and Macintosh
Why Dropbox?
It’s always a good idea to have backup copies of your important files. If your computer were to be stolen or lost or replaced, moving the backup copies of your ebooks to a new computer will then be easy.
Also, because mobile apps (iPad, Android) do not allow any outside access to data stored by apps, we need the COW app itself to move copies of its own data into and out of your mobile device. Dropbox is necessary to move ebooks to and from your mobile version of COW.
A free Dropbox account works best for this. There is no advantage to having a paid Dropbox account except for a much larger available storage area.
How to set up Dropbox on Windows and Macintosh
The Connect button is for starting the connection between your computer 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 COW 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 computer to Dropbox. The Download button will copy the highlighted file in Dropbox to your computer.
The Delete button allows you to delete the highlighted file from the cloud. (Deleting ebooks from the computer is done from the COW 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 computer 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 computer and the Dropbox cloud. 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 an ebook already in the cloud with the same name.
Join the Challenge
Enter your best email address so I can notify you of the next challenge.
Thanks! Look for an email from me (Mike) in the next few minutes.