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Dropbox (Win) not syncing "internal" symlinks created from Dropbox (mac)
On one of my mac computers, I created several symlinks inside Dropbox folder that point to other files or directories also inside the Dropbox folder. Those symlinks are synced to other mac computers ...
grimhike wrote:On one of my mac computers, I created several symlinks inside Dropbox folder that point to other files or directories also inside the Dropbox folder. Those symlinks are synced to other mac computers or Linux computers, only as links, not including the full file content.
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Hi grimhike,
A link may point to a file or folder in different way. Path to target object (file or folder) can be set relative to the link position, relative to user home position or be absolute! How all your links point to their targets? 🤔 If, for example, on one MAC, your user name is 'user1' but on other 'user2', target file on the first device with path /Users/user1/Dropbox/myFile.txt on the second device will look like /Users/user2/Dropbox/myFile.txt. In such a way link pointing myFile.txt on the first device using absolute path will point to nowhere on the second device (there is NOT such path 🙂). Similar situation can come up when relative to user home is used (when Dropbox place changes). Only link path you can rely will work properly on Dropbox (and not only) is relative to link position! 😉 Make sure you have set correct path in the correct WAY.
Hope this helps.
Most of the symlinks are relatively linked, namely the target paths do not go beyond the root Dropbox path. For example, I have
/some/path/to/Dropbox/project-x/reports/annual/2021/report.pdfas a real file. Then I create a symlink to that as follow;
/some/path/to/Dropbox/project-x/reports/quarter/2022/q1/last.pdfby this command;
$ cd /some/path/to/Dropbox/project-x/reports/quarter/2022/q1 $ ln -s ../../../annual/2021/report.pdf last.pdfand the OS shows the correct relative path
$ ls -l ... ... last.pdf -> ../../../annual/2021/report.pdfDropbox on the computer on which I created the link has no problem uploading the file and symlink. On the flip side, if the client is mac or Linux, Dropbox has no problem downloading the link, and the link works as expected. However, when the flip side is Windows, Dropbox refuses to download the file at all saying there's an issue in the file name (which is not true).
There is a symlink in my Dropbox that I created on mac and it's actually linked via an absolute path. So the target path starts with `/Users/my_name/Dropbox/...` but the Dropbox desktop on a Linux has no problem downloading the link. It's the OS that cannot resolve the path following the link (because on the Linux machine, there's no such file). Again, the Windows Dropbox client just refuses to download it in no time, showing that red "1" notification.
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