+1 to what Abdullah and Sara have said about git and Github. If your student workers have any interest in this sort of work outside of the job itself then any time they may spend to become comfortable with these powerful tools will not be wasted.
That said, as noted, Dropbox does offer access to file version history and restoration of deleted files and folders, so that might be enough for your purposes. In my experience it often doesn’t handle simultaneous users of shared files very elegantly, so there is need for caution if that will be a common scenario. Google Drive is much better in this regard, but it’s not as flexible with respect to file types.
Josh
-- Joshua A. Westgard, MLS, PhD Systems Librarian Digital Systems and Stewardship Division University of Maryland Libraries College Park, MD 20742-7011 301-405-9136 (office) westgard@umd.edu
On Dec 30, 2014, at 15:52 PM, Sara L. Uckelman s.l.uckelman@durham.ac.uk wrote:
On 12/30/2014 11:30 AM, Abdullah Alger wrote:
Saying that, if your students are working on digital humanities projects and are coding, they should learn Git. It's an essential tool that professionals use every day.
I was traveling all day and thus the recommendations I would've made have already been made by other people, but I cannot pass up the opportunity to second this, very strongly. Properly implemented, git can be extremely user friendly to use (my DMNES project linked in my sig involves a lot of data entry and requires scrupulous version controlling; my editors have a web-front end that they use and beyond creating an account on github, they never interact with git at all), and there is a large amount of documentation and help out there for those who are willing to put in a little bit (i.e., an afternoon) of time into learning it. Learning how to use git should be considered a requirement of someone who intends to work in digital humanities, just as learning LaTeX is one for anyone working in math or logic.
-Sara
-- Dr. Sara L. Uckelman Department of Philosophy Durham University https://www.dur.ac.uk/philosophy/staff/?id=12928 http://dmnes.wordpress.com/
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