In your tutorial, you wrote, “Open File” then choose your DropBox action. Your graphic showed “sync with dropbox”. Was this a “choice” shown in the menu? My menu showed “iCal” or “Other”. I chose “Other” and then “Drop Box Automated Workflow”.

Is this correct? If so, does this mean my files will be backed up once everyday and not say, every hour, as an external hard drive back up would? Does Drop Box replace an Ext. HD back up or would you recommend having both?

Also, Does Drop Box notify you if you’ve exceeded the free 2GB?

Thanks!

Thanks for putting the time in to write it up. I’m saving tons of time now!

Just use folder actions instead of a normal Automator workflow. You’d create the same workflow, but it would be triggered when items are added to the specified directory. It’s simple to do this for a single directory–it gets complicated if you want to back up the contents of a directory that includes subdirectories because the automator workflow will only detect files added to the directory to which the action is attached. To include subdirectories, you’d have to attach the action to every subdirectory somehow.

Here’s a question, though…

Yesterday, I tried to get cute and change the “copy find items” command to the “move finder items” command instead. I really don’t want to create a backup as much as I just want to have the files reside inside Dropbox alone.

Overnight, the automated process did not run. When I tested it this morning within Automator, itself, I got an error message about not having permission to move files to Dropbox.

Any ideas what’s wrong here? It’s a work computer (Mac Mini) where I’m the administrator of my machine. Again, the “copy” feature worked fine the other day, but “moving” files hit a snag.

Thanks!