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How can I keep my symlinks in the Dropbox folder on my Mac OS?
For years I have used symlinks in my dropbox to the subfolders of my home directory in Mac OS (e.g. /Users/myname/Music, Documents, Pictures etc.) so the the files I'm working in in /Music, /Pictures...
Hi _chris! Thank you for joing Dropbox Community.
Even though symlinks could work up to one point, they were never officially supported as they would cause issues various syncing issues and high CPU usage.
Some Community discussions about this:
https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Files-folders/Sync-never-end-for-a-symbolic-link/m-p/324962
https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Files-folders/Syncing-when-using-symbolic-links/td-p/312221
A workaround to have this working is posted by my colleague Celeste here: https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Files-folders/Moving-folders-files-to-meet-new-symlink-rules/td-p/364624
Feel free to let me know all your questions and even subscribe to the thread above to be notified for responses there.
Hope this helps! :slight_smile:
P.S. You can subscribe to any Community thread to see what other people have posted from the ellipsis button (...) on the top right side of the thread.
Hi Fiona. Thanks for this fast answer ! Both my Macbooks Air are on Mojave 10.14.6. But as you stated even if I was able to move my system folders in the dropbox folder that would require me to change a lot of my work setups and habits to get everything right again. I'm really surprised that Dropbox still not allows to sync files where they are on the computer instead of forcing users to move them in the Dropbox folders. I have been reviewing other syncinc services those past weeks as I could not use Dropbox (and need a constant saving of my most crucial folders - /Desktop and /Documents - on the cloud as it is kind of a "up to date work insurance" for me as freelancer... if my computer crashes I do not loose my work and can pick up almost right where I left off on my other one without too much time or data loss) and most of them all seem to offer this basic option : just select the folders you want synced wherever they are... Howcome such an advanced system as yours does not allow it ? Thanks again. N
Fiona
Dropbox Staff
Dropbox StaffYeah.. I know what you mean. :slight_frown:
Currently, Dropbox can "see" only what's in Dropbox. Hope in the future we could sync a whole computer and all types of systems they include. Your feedback is always helpful and want to thank you for taking the time to post this comment in our discussion.
If there is anything else I could help with, please don't hesitate to tag my name in any Community thread. I will be glad to assist! :nerd:
Cheers!
Thanks for this fast and honest answer ! At least I'll stop going crazy wondering if I'm missing something somewhere and waiting for email answers 🤪 ! Hope this will also help others like @_chris and me. Last question is regarding the possibility of getting my suscription money back. As I said, I renewed it a week before everything stopped working and I obviously wouldn't have if I had realised that. Not a lot of hope here neither but maybe you could help ! Many thanks again.
- Thanks for sharing your experience, Nbpw, and for the further replies from Dropbox. Yeah, in light of this I’ve just changed my workflow slightly and copied all the items out of my /music, /documents etc folders in the home directory on my Mac into new folders that live inside the Dropbox folder. It seemed that was the most straightforward way to keep everything synced.
- Fiona
Thank you for your kind response Nbpw.
I see you have a ticket still open with our team. I have no view of your account or transactions via Community to check if you are eligible for a refund, but the agent handling your case can look into that. :wink:Hope we can give you your money back.
_chris, thanks for posting your solution!
Have a nice day.
This is still working for me today. Just setup a new machine and my symlinks made using "ln -s" are syncing files properly. Good to see it still working for me at least, but I want to know why it works for me and not others? Will this feature be taken away from me too? I've been using symlinks without issue for 10 years on a paid Dropbox account. I never got an email about symlinks being broken by Dropbox.
If this breaks I will have to switch to a more advanced service that allows syncing of files either via symlinks or explicitly choosing folders to sync.
