Comments on: Using Dropbox and PortableApps together

By: Cliff

Cliff — Mon, 10 May 2010 18:08:00 +0000

Hi Aaron. You may be encountering one of the limitations of Thunderbird–its problems with large folders. I’ve encountered this problem before, and there are suggested fixes here: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Limits_-_Thunderbird#Folders_and_messages . I hope that helps!

By: Aaron DaMommio

Aaron DaMommio — Wed, 05 May 2010 15:24:26 +0000

I had PortableThunderbird in my DropBox folder, and was really happy with using it on two different computers effortlessly. But I kept getting errors where it would tell me that there wasn’t enough space to download a message. I switched it out of the DropBox folder and those errors stopped. There’s plenty of space on the drive and in the DropBox account, so I don’t get what is going on here. Any hints?

By: Cliff

Cliff — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 22:26:38 +0000

There are two things that I've done to improve the performance of Dropbox and Thunderbird together. 1) Load Thunderbird portable on a jump drive. 2) Set my "Local Folders" to a folder in Dropbox. This helped to reduce the conflicts that were arising. If you leave all of ThunderbirdPortable in Dropbox, Dropbox can have problems with synching the system files, which can cause errors in TbirdPortable. Thunderbird also has difficulty with large mail folders (with an upper limit of 4gb). So if you archive a lot of mail (like I do!), it's important to regularly export your mail using ImportExportTools or a similar plugin.

By: Michel

Michel — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 07:54:56 +0000

I’m doing the same with Portable Thunderbird since 4 months now. I manage 8 email addresses and an archive folder with many subfolders.
Everytime I’m taking care that the dropbox is synced before change computer. But I get conflict very often on big folders.
Also the cahce folder of the dropbox application is growing and the hard disk became full some time.

Do you have an idea about what to do to avoid conflict and cache growing?

By: Owen Kelly

Owen Kelly — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 13:45:20 +0000

I just realised that your method has two very decided advantages over mine.

I am trying to keep my netbook “clean”, so that Windows behaves as well as it can. Periodically I intend to reinstall it.

If I make as many of my apps as possible PortableApps then:

1. they won’t ever do anything to the registry which should help keep Windows running smoothly;

2. they will reinstall themselves automatically as soon as I (manually) reinstall Dropbox – including all my tweaks and customizations.

I’m convinced and off to do it right now :)

By: Cliff

Cliff — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 18:13:49 +0000

Hi Owen! I think it would do pretty much the same thing, as long as each computer is set up to refer to that folder, and there’s enough time for the folder to sync between use.

By: Owen Kelly

Owen Kelly — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 15:52:37 +0000

I have done something similar with Thunderbird, except that I have put the profile folder into Dropbox and left the application in the Programs folder on each computer.

Is this any different in terms of usability or does it amount to the same thing? It does let me use Thunderbird 3 beta 4 for one thing, but that is a purely temporary advantage :)

By: Maia

Maia — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 18:38:11 +0000

Wow. That is a really cool idea! I’m really interested in cloud computing and the whole idea of information moving off the desktop, but I thought it’d be a while until our applications did too!

By: hue

hue — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 13:22:43 +0000

Brilliant. This idea pop’d in my mind a second ago, decided to google it and this post came up. Btw SoundCloud is doing an idea with Dropbox where randoms can drop mp3 (etc) into your DB, check out an example here: http://soundcloud.com/gottadancedirty/dropbox