Posterous theme by Cory Watilo

Figured out what was going on with my dropbox/drive space

With the sudden unavailability of free drive space on my netbook, I did a little digging to see what could be done to lasso in some pesky space-waters.  When I ran WinDirStat I was surprised to see that Dropbox accounted for 24.6GB of hard drive space.  This seemed particularly odd, since I only have about 12GB in my whole account.

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So this one took a little digging, but I now understand what the heck was going on.  I hit google and found some answers.

As files are accessed and updated, there is a copy of each iteration kept around for 3 days in case you want to roll back.  This hadn't been an issue previously, but I recently added an Outlook Personal Folders (.pst) file to my dropbox during a move to my new laptop.

The file is about 1GB on its own...and as I dropped files out there, an additional "old" version of the whole file was kept.  At a gig per hit, that's a lot of overhead, if only for 3 days.

Dropbox is smart enough to only push the changed parts of the file...so I didn't notice a bandwidth hit that would come with uploading, say 8GB per day.  Instead, I was uploading a couple MB per day.  Fortunately, you can delete the files in the dropbox cache without concern (though it'll take longer to roll back to a less-than-three-day-old-file if you find the need to).

On a side note, hooray for only replicating the changed blocks!  See former co-workers, block level storage technology is cool and useful! ;)

So I suppose the take-away is to be mindful of keeping files (large ones in particular) in your Dropbox if they're going to be changing regularly.

Yes, Dropbox is still my top file cloud-sync choice (has been for years).  SkyDrive is making progress, and Google Drive has potential, but Dropbox just plain works.

Is there a conspiracy to ruin Chevy Chase?

He's had hits and misses, but to date the laughs outweigh the groans.  I've just read two different articles where Chevy is in demand.  The likelihood of at least one of these being absolute rubbish is pretty high...and the odds of both being awful is much higher than the odds of both being good.
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One article is about him and Dan Aykroid and that they have started a project they can't talk about.  The latter is a bit of a red flag on it's own.  Still, I'm hopeful they can find a recipe for an enjoyable movie.

The other is an appeal from the minds behind ||| who are calling for Chevy Chase and Beverly D'Angelo to reprise their roles as the Griswolds.  Ahhhhhhhhhh run away!!!  Don't tarnish the franchise any further!!

Time will tell, but like I said, I think there might be a conspiracy to ruin Chevy Chase.  Maybe a four leaf clover will bring him some luck.

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Microsoft ads show alternatives to Google

Microsoft means business...they've turned their sights directly on their competitors in their latest online marketing campaigns.  Seriously, they don't make some vague reference to a competitor, they're calling them out!

The Google is most visibly  in the crosshairs.  Google Docs is under the most fire, targeting both consumers (first video) and organizations (second video) touting Office Web Apps as the answer.

I'm a big fan of the office web apps.  The functionality meets probably 90% of what users actually need, and they play nice with the desktop versions.  They're right in their videos....Google Docs falls short here.  They also have some side-by-side comparisons they link to (here's the one for Excel)

They also have a funny email that humanizes the way Google targets ads by monitoring keywords in your email.  

Fun videos, but they need more focus on how someone would actually make the switch.  I understand "sign up" (or sign in) but that's only the first step.  Give more.

The direct offense tactics carry over into other competitive spaces for MS as well.  One example near and dear to my heart is Dynamics CRM Online as the right choice over Salesforce.com.  Not as flashy, but good stuff nonetheless.