Right. I get a call, I need to leave for a meeting in 5 minutes. This is exactly the time when I want to cut branch commits, push branches, pull branches, commit and rebase. Even rsync is better than that.

Put it another way, I don't understand why you'd use Dropbox at all, after all you could easily version all your files in git, using push/pull/branch/commit/rebase to get your data to your different machines. Git handles this problem very well, after all.

The specific problem with git in Dropbox is that working in git can cause a large number of transient files changes as you, for example, switch branches. Dropbox doesn't know those are transient changes and attempts to sync all of them. That is one reason it can drain battery so fast.

Obviously with regular files, that is not an issue, so Dropbox works well. (unless you're managing them with git, I guess)

If you're willing to accept the "lightness" of git branching and commits, it's possible to "save and sync" your work very quickly. Assuming you're on a dev branch:

git add -A

git commit -m "temp commit 2013-7-3"

git push origin

You can even script this, see for example:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8482843/git-commit-bash-s...

Then when you're ready to work on a different machine, you fetch from origin.

If you want to keep your commits meaningful on your dev branch, you can create a temp branch first, then rebase later to get rid of the ugly temp commit.

git checkout -b temp123

I don't use dropbox at all? To me it is a great solution for consumers but my needs are different. I use git + standard unix tools. For backup I use tarsnap. It rocks.

You don't understand or you didn't spend ti e thinking about that. It's doing all those steps, or doing nothing and achieving the same result. Not sure what you don't understand.