I use the Android app Draft to compose Markdown documents. This syncs them with my Dropbox account, however lacks versioning, or even undo functionality. Some reviews on the Google Play site indicated that users has inadvertently deleted data while typing, so I needed a solution to:

1. protect my data, and
2. version control it

Since all the data passes through Dropbox, I set out to have my Linode server mirror the Dropbox files, and auto-commit them to Git using GitWatch.

The Process

We install headless Dropbox:

# install from https://www.dropbox.com/install2
dropbox start

and GitWatch:

sudo aptitude install inotify-tools
wget -O ~/bin/gitwatch.sh https://raw.github.com/nevik/gitwatch/master/gitwatch.sh
chmod +x ~/bin/gitwatch.sh

then test:

dropbox start
~/bin/gitwatch.sh ~/Dropbox/Draft > /dev/null &
cd ~/Dropbox/Draft; watch git log -n 1 # now, make an edit!

Now, we make everything start at startup by putting the following at the end of into crontab -e:

@reboot ~/.dropbox-dist/dropboxd
@reboot ~/bin/gitwatch.sh ~/Dropbox/Draft

author: Ben Eills | | list of all pages