[Gramps-users] Gramps inside Dropbox

[Peter K. <pj...@gm...>]

I know that various versions of this question have been asked and
answered before, but (i) I don't fully understand the answers that
have been given, and (ii) I think my needs are a little different from
those of the people who asked previously.

I know that some people want to use Gramps from a shared/networked
location so that they can use a single Gramps database on different
machines (e.g. laptop at the library, desktop at home). The usual
response is that this is dangerous, because small differences in
Gramps version or OS version can cause problems.

I would like to run Gramps from inside Dropbox for two rather
different, but I think important, reasons:

(i) Dropbox keeps multiple backups, going back 30 days, so if I
realise (within a month) that I've done something dumb, or corrupted
my database, I can roll back to one of the earlier versions.

(ii) Because I experiment with different software, and tinker in
various ways to refine my system, I occasionally run into problems and
decide to do a clean (re)install of the OS (I use Ubuntu, but have
also experimented with Debian and Mint). I know that I can keep my
/home folder intact from one OS version to the next, but sometimes I
need to start afresh, and in these cases it would save me a lot of
hassle if Gramps were not buried, hidden, inside the /home folder.
There are other situations in which I might want to keep Gramps
separate from the /home folder: for example, for a while I had a small
but fast harddrive which I used just for the OS, and kept all my data
on another, larger but slower HD.

So, can anyone tell me if I can move all the necessary files into
Dropbox folder, and if so, in a newbie-friendly step-by-step way
(suitable for adding to the wiki), how to do it?

Thanks in advance,

Peter