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neilcothran's avatar
neilcothran
Helpful | Level 5
8 years ago
Solved

Syncing when using symbolic links

Hello, I am having an issue concerning dropbox syncing when using symbolic links. Using Windows 10 and the Dropbox app, recently downloaded / installed so I believe it is fully up to date. On the ...
desktop
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sync
  • Jay's avatar
    Jay
    8 years ago
    Hi Neil, long story short, Dropbox doesn’t support symlinks and never has. 
     
    If they do work, it is purely luck, since the majority of the time it creates performance issues, permission failures and data loss.
     
    This article describes a little more about what symlinks could do if found in a Dropbox folder.
     
    Hope this helps!
neilcothran's avatar
neilcothran
Helpful | Level 5
8 years ago
Ha, thanks, understood. It's not a bug, it's a feature! As a long-time programmer myself, I should have realized how badly I misspoke... :)

Would be nice if there was a "rescan all" button.. Oh well the work-around works. Just takes three clicks instead of one.

Fantastic product nonetheless!
neilcothran's avatar
neilcothran
Helpful | Level 5
8 years ago

Finally got around to making this post to update....

Ok so my thought was to have a "rescan all" button, and since we dont.....

Workaround is to stop and restart Dropbox app.  So I now have 2 icons on the desktop: one to kill Dropbox and the "normal" one to start it.

The first one has a one-line command:  taskkill.exe /f /im dropbox.exe

Double-click, wait a sec, double-click the "normal" Dropbox app.

Problem solved.

  • hoanglan87's avatar
    hoanglan87
    New member | Level 2
    7 years ago

    Another update for who still have same problem:
    Put the file/folder in your dropbox and make the symlink outside in the original location.

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