Dropbox (Experimental) Finally Gets Selective Sync

The latest experimental Dropbox build finally adds selective sync support.

So what is selective sync?

Selective sync allows you to choose the folders you want synced to your computer. Selective Sync gives you the ability to have more control over what is synced to your devices through the Dropbox Desktop Application.

Here's an example: imagine your Dropbox folder is about 10 GB in size (you can get up to 10 GB for free only by referring people to use Dropbox) and you want to sync some files with your netbook where you only have 5 GB of space left on the HDD. Here's where selective sync kicks in: using the latest version of Dropbox (experimental) you can select which folders to sync for each computer where Dropbox is running. That means that you can choose to only sync a folder you need on your netbook, and not all the folders you have in your Dropbox. Obviously this feature is not just for when you don't have enough space, but for a lot more various reasons - that was just an example.

More info on selective sync, HERE.

Other 2 great features which are not present in the stable Dropbox are available in the experimental builds for quite some time: AppIndicator support for Ubuntu as well as customizable notification area icons.

You can download the latest Dropbox Experimental from HERE. For Linux, you can simply paste this in a terminal to upgrade to the latest Dropbox experimental build:

32bit:

dropbox stop && cd ~
wget http://dl-web.dropbox.com/u/17/dropbox-lnx.x86-0.8.64.tar.gz
tar -xvf dropbox-lnx.x86-0.8.64.tar.gz
dropbox start

64bit:

dropbox stop && cd ~
wget http://dl-web.dropbox.com/u/17/dropbox-lnx.x86_64-0.8.64.tar.gz
tar -xvf dropbox-lnx.x86_64-0.8.64.tar.gz
dropbox start

In case the above links don't work anymore, manually download the latest experimental Dropbox from HERE.

There's also a bash script for Linux you can use to stay up to date with the latest Dropbox experimental builds.