Using statacons with Dropbox or similar

Be cautious when using statacons in Dropbox or similar services (e.g., Google Drive). You may run into problems if Dropbox "locks" an actively syncing file, and it seems like there is a risk of corrupted or conflicting sconsign.dblite files, especially if you are sharing with other machines.

If you need to use statacons and Dropbox together, here are a few pieces of advice:

1. Make sure you using Available offline and not Online only. (Similarly for Google Drive.)

2. It would be a good idea to create a rules.dropboxignore file with a line

**/.sconsign.dblite

so that these are always ignored. See https://help.dropbox.com/sync/how-to-prevent-files-from-syncing for more information on rules.dropboxignore files. Two important things to note: (1) this goes in the global root of your Dropbox folder, you cannot (as of July 2026) have different rules files in different folders. However, in the global rules.dropboxignore file, you can specify certain directories; (2) the rules.dropboxignore file itself will not be synced, so you will have to create and update it in each place you use dropbox.

3. The sig-....txt, stata-....log and stata-....do files that complete_datasignature creates and erases are prone to getting locked. This usually just means that these files just don't get erased, but it can cause errors. To avoid these sorts of problems, it is a good idea to pause Dropbox's syncing before running statacons.

One workaround may be to add the following to rules.dropboxignore:

**/sig-????????.txt
**/stata-????????.do
**/stata-????????.log

since all these files should match these patterns (8 wildcard characters). However: (1) this will apply globally, which may be a problem if for some reason you have other files matching these patterns that you would like to sync; (2) while this does stop syncing it appears that Dropbox still does interact with them in some way and so they may occasionally still get locked.