If you use Dropbox, the very popular file sharing service, you might have noticed that some of your files have the words Conflicted Copy appended to their file name. There are two circumstances which can cause conflicted copies. They most commonly occur when two people edit the same file at the same time. They can also occur when a file is left-open on a computer in an application which uses auto-save.

I use and recommend Dropbox. In fact I’ve talked about it in several previous tech tips. This one gives a good overview of Dropbox. Many of my clients use Dropbox, and the only complaint that I hear is about how Dropbox handles files edited by two people at the same time. Since Dropbox stores a copy of each file on each person’s computer, it’s easy for two people to edit the same file at the same time. In fact, Dropbox has no way to prevent this. By creating conflicted copies, Dropbox preserves the work done by both people. This is a good safety measure. The challenge is that reconciling the two copies or merging the two copies is left in your hands. While I haven’t tested the following application, Merge for Mac  is a file comparison and merging application which could help you reconcile conflicted copies.