Git, Dropbox and Rstudio

Question

I use Dropbox to sync my RStudio projects on multiple machines. I also use Git to backup my code to an external site. Now here is the question. When I start RStudio, Dropbox is madly trying to index the .git / index.lock file. I checked that this file appears and disappears from the .git subfolder of the project folder. It does this very quickly, you must constantly keep the "Update" shortcut to see it. As a result, Dropbox uses the entire processor core, causing the processor fan to spin 100%. I turned off .Rproj.user folder sync as described in other FAQ sections, but this seems to be an unrelated problem.

Currently, I have to suspend Dropbox manually to avoid CPU and power loss, but it would be nice to find the reason for this behavior. RStudio support suggested disabling synchronization for the .git folder. I'm not 100% familiar with Git, wouldn't that create conflicts when I made commits from different unsynchronized machines? Why is index.lock file popping up quickly? The support mentioned said it was a problem between Dropbox and Git, not RStudio. Moreover, the problem arises in some projects, but not in others, and I can’t pinpoint the culprit. Thanks for any suggestions!

Answer 1

Git and Dropbox do not play together , at least with a working copy. This is normal if you have a bare repo on Dropbox; if you want to synchronize the Git repository between machines, prefer things like GitHub or BitBucket.