Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Servicesĭouble click this service from this project and tab over to 'Log On'. (The same one you used to install Dropbox with.) The service that this project makes, will simply run under the Administrator account. You have now prepared Dropbox to be able to be started from this service, and to be able to run in the computers background.

Right click on the icon again and Exit Dropbox.

Under general, uncheck 'show desktop notifications' and 'start Dropbox on system startup'.

Right click on it, and go to the settings.

Now Dropbox is running and the icon is in the tray.

Pop your details in there, and complete the wizard.

Once installed, it will bring up the little post install wizard.

Log into the server as an Administrator or Admin level account (one that can install applications).

But first you have to do some preliminary work. You can however, make a service run as a user account. So Dropbox simply will not work if it has to run as the 'Local System' account. There are no such things as user accounts from the perspective of a service. This of course posed a bit of a problem when using Dropbox as a server based application, because now it changes from being a user based application to a server based application. The problem was that Dropbox, and I guess most of these applications are designed to run as an application, under the currently logged in user. It was a windows 2008 server but it could have been just about any Windows PC. BackgroundĪ while back we decided to use Dropbox as a Backup solution on one of our servers. The problem is that these applications doesn't work on windows servers, because they will only run on a user account, and as soon as you log out, or reboot the server, the application stops. If ever the PC fails, just get a new one, install the desktop app, and you're back in hours, not days. Cloud storage applications are great, they save money, time, and they pretty much operate on a set-and-forget basis.

Using dropbox as a server