Re: Dropbox and "Your local changes to the following files would be overwritten by merge"

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jul 23, 2022, 18:09 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqczdvaegs.fsf@gitster.g>
In-Reply-To: <YtwH7pOnDgv+MYmh@tapette.crustytoothpaste.net>

"brian m. carlson" <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net> writes:

Show 8 quoted lines

> It's known that Dropbox and other cloud syncing services can corrupt
> repositories.  They can cause files to be removed, renamed, or reappear
> after being deleted, and I suspect that's what's happening here.
> ...
> I'd recommend moving the data out of the Dropbox repository regardless,
> since, as I mentioned, it is known to cause corruption, and you won't
> know it until it's too late.  You may want to additionally run "git
> fsck" to see if that finds any problems other than dangling objects.

An anticipated follow-up question is "but then how do I replicate the repository across my machines? that is the reason why I have it in Dropbox in the first place", and the above is a hard-to-follow advice until it has a good answer.

E.g. after finished working at a site, prepare to take the "latest" to the next place you will work at in a bundle,

    $ git bundle create 2022-07-23.bndl --all HEAD
    $ mv 2022-07-23.bndl $my_dropbox_directory/.

and when you get to the next place to work at, you'd "fetch" from it into the repository you keep, or you can choose *NOT* to maintain any local copy there at all and "git clone" from the bundle every time you restart at a different place.