Sunday, May 24, 2015

Revisions for Dropbox

Revisions (App Store) (via Brett Terpstra):

The Mac OS X app that displays all your Dropbox edits, shows exactly what changes were made, and provides unlimited undo going back 30 days (or more).

One of the signature features of Revisions is that you can obtain a copy of an entire directory (including any subdirectories) at the state it was in at a user-specified point in time. To do this, first select the folder you are interested in using the folder selector at the top. Then, you will need to wait for Revisions to finish indexing that folder. Finally, move the pointer over the small space between any pair of adjacent edit groups, and click on one of the folder action buttons that appears, to download or restore a folder to that particular point in time.

This is cool, since there’s no automated way to do this using the regular Dropbox interface.

When Revisions first connects to your Dropbox account, it needs to create a list of all file edits. This is accomplished by asking for revision metadata for each and every one of your Dropbox files. The main factor that determines the indexing time is thus the number of files in your Dropbox. If your Dropbox contains many tens of thousands of files (or more) indexing can take several hours even with an excellent internet connection.

My Dropbox has about 2,000 items, and this step only took a minute or two. The Core Data SQLite index is 22.5 MB.

Update (2015-06-16): Michael E. Cohen:

The free version of Revisions can do everything I’ve just described. If, however, you purchase the $9.99 in-app upgrade to the Premium version, you get some additional functionality. Premium provides the capability to filter files shown in the timeline by name; for example, you can choose to show edits involving .html files only, or just edits involving files that contain “TextExpander” as part of their names. If you use shared folders (and, boy, do we use the heck out of shared folders at Take Control Books!), Premium shows you who among the users who share a folder have performed a particular edit.

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