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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.
Fiona
Dropbox Staff
Dropbox StaffThank 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.
- Fiona
So suprised this still works for you intarray. Lucky you! :hear_no_evil:
I am afraid that not all the updates of the Dropbox desktop application have gone through in your case and this is why it still works.
Please read here how the Dropbox desktop application handles symlinks nowadays.
Let me know if you have any questions.
intarray wrote:and @Tyler N, what Dropbox alternatives have you been looking at? This symlink change also has me moving on to a better solution and I would be keen to hear your recommendations.
I've been a user for a decade now. This mandatory symlink change is assinine, especially under the guise that it is better for us because it causes sync issues or high CPU usage. My atom powered backup server never had a single problem in the last decade - if it causes high CPU usage then I should decide whether I want to enable it or not.
Dropbox should backup my files, period. Not dictate how large an individual disk is or how data is organized on my server. What's next, dropbox only syncs if you're wearing a t-shirt and shoes?
Hi all. After long weeks of wondering, I went for the MEGA option that allaws me to sync my Dektop and Documents (on MacOS) for free. Not enough space for everything (Music etc.) but works fine. My only problem at this point is that it's not an app automatically included in the Word/Excel for Mac on my iPad which I use to work when i'm on the road. but still better than what Dropbox has to offer (for more than a 100$ a year) for my needs.... If you find a better solution, I'm all ears !
- sigh -
After cooling off a bit and getting home from my trip, I sucked it up and spent the better part of a day carefully restructuring my files for continued use with Dropbox. And I'm happy with the result.
So nullptr, I didn't bring myself to actually look into alternatives again (I've done it several times in the past, without success), so I can't help. Except with this small tidbit: instead of creating a symbolic link inside of Dropbox pointing outward to the actual folder, you can also move the actual folder into Dropbox and then create a symbolic link on the outside pointing in, as suggested here: https://www.howtogeek.com/204595/how-to-move-special-folders-on-os-x-to-cloud-storage/. But as it also says there, this might work just fine for most "special" folders (Documents, Music), but it's still probably not a good idea to move Desktop, so that challenge still remains for me. For now, I'm just going to replace all folders on my desktop with symbolic links and minimize the number of files I keep there at any given point. (And use Time Machine regularly.)
So Fiona, your customer service skills basically won the day here. :) But if you do come across a workaround for backing up MacOS Desktop with Dropbox via symlinks (= question from Racer), please let us know. I see that you merged discussions about this, so please just help me make sure that I hear about the answer if it gets posted.
Tyler N. wrote:instead of creating a symbolic link inside of Dropbox pointing outward to the actual folder, you can also move the actual folder into Dropbox and then create a symbolic link on the outside pointing in.
My symlinked folders are larger than the drive where my dropbox folder lives, so this is not an option.
I will be solving this problem after the holiday rush and will let you know what cloud storage solution I land on, we are running local backups and bringing the backup disks off-site until then. I'll probably be posting an article on Medium as well.
