Symphony.

Well, Dropbox is known for becoming slow when syncing lots of files and Git, by design, creates lots of files on your harddrive. You can encourage packing those many loose objects into few packed objects by running git gc on a regular basis though.

Also Dropbox will start syncing stuff as soon as you do basically anything: checkout, stash, commit, fetch, rebase, reset etc. I'd fear that if I was working too fast, Dropbox would start creating conflicted copies of my files.

Even worse, Git's internal storage is even more fragile (Git is by no means a backup method!) and because Dropbox was designed to handle your average .doc files it is just too careless when it comes to manipulating files or filenames. If something in there fails, you might see yourself out of luck.

Hence I personally wouldn't recommend using it as your workspace-repository.

Instead, I'd create a --bare repository in my Dropbox and still have a separate workspace repo on each machine. So if one of those three fails, I'd still be more or less fine.

And once I came to the point that I purposefully wanted separate repositories on my machines, I decided to skip Dropbox altogether and go with regular SSH instead. :-)

@phoque - good points (hence the warning). Still: I have never encountered issues (and use a remote) so feel pretty comfy for now.

Thanks for the git gc tip. Never used it to be honest…

I'm not sure I completely understand the --bare benefits. If I understand correctly a --bare repo can only be pushed to/pulled from. So, in your case, you suggest using it as a 'intermediary remote'?

I remain a bit of a Git n00b, thanks for your helpful Git tips!

Speaking of services, I like the pricing of indefero (github alternative): http://indefero.net/plans/

Since they are open source you can also install it on your own, but not really hassle free I guess...

This is a pretty old post, but I wanted to share a GitHub open source alternative/clone: GitPrep, easy to install even on a shared hosting (with shell access).

Check out Gitlab if you haven't already. Github with built in CI. It's quite brilliant to be honest.