There are basically three logs on the system:
Log:
- for short, textual data
- in-memory ringbuffer, fast
- ephemeral (you'll lose it on a crash, or the ringbuffer scrolls)
- intended for app developers
EventLog is:
- for short, binary data
- in-memory ringbuffer, fast
- ephemeral (you'll lose it on a crash, or the ringbuffer scrolls)
- intended for platform developers to collect statistics
DropBox:
- for long text or binary data
- persistent, written to disk
- kinda slow (disk)
- meant for platform developers too, mostly to collect crashes & large statistics
- subject to limits, deleted by tag if a tag's count and/or size get too large
DropBox is what we used during development to capture all the StrictMode violations in Gingerbread.
You can use DropBox for one-off debugging, but it's not really recommended. It's definitely not recommended as a way to share data between apps. It's not reliable enough, and you can't put permissions on the data. You should just use a shared userid and use the normal filesystem with appropriate permissions.