We’re Still Here to Help (Even Over the Holidays!) - find out more here.
Forum Discussion
Solved
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.
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
Dropbox Staff
Dropbox StaffSo 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.
