Syncing when using symbolic links

Hi Jay,

Many thanks for the response.

Interesting .... I've not observed any of the issues mentioned in the article your link pointed me to.  The use of symlinks seems to work quite well, except for the "update" bug I originally mentioned.  As long as I remember to "force" the re-sync, everything falls out as I wanted, giving me the ability to "carry things around" from computer to computer without all the aggravation / overhead of copying to USB's etc which ends up duplicating data and creating version control headaches.

After doing some more experimenting, I note that the problem as I've described is apparently uni-directional: Changes made on the "host" machine (the one with the symlinks in the Dropbox folder) need the "forced" update as described.  Changes from other computers as well as from the Dropbox web portal are reflected to the "host" machine vitually instantly, as long as it is online.  That accomplishes exactly what I intended: the ability to "carry work home" and voila, there it is on the office PC instantly.

So far, so good.  But, what I've done thus far is shared only with myself; I've not tried sharing amongst others, simply because thus far I've not needed to.  But I suspect that the same thing would happen.

Just My Humble Opinion, but it would perhaps be good if Dropbox could find a way to "officially" support the use of symlinks.  In the meantime, perhaps I can find some way to "trigger" the app to do the update thing.

Again, thanks for your support.

Hi Jay,

Actually they do (or at least seem to so far) if created properly. This obviously fails:

% cd ~/Dropbox ;   ln -s ~/mydir ./mydir

But if the symlink is from outside Dropbox to a file that is inside Dropbox, it seems to work fine. But only if the link is created carefully. Curiously, this fails:

% cd ~/Dropbox ;  ln -s myDropboxDir ~/mydir

And this fails:

% cd ~/Dropbox ; ln -s myDropboxDir mydir ; mv mydir ~

BUT this works:

% cd ~ ; ln -s ~/Dropbox/DropboxDir mydir

You end up with a directory (actually a soft link) ~/mydir that works perfectly well, with contents accessible on all machines using the Dropbox account.

Going end to end:

mac1> cd ~/Dropbox; mkdir myDropboxDir ; cd ~ ; ln -s Dropbox/myDropboxDir ./mydir

Makes a perfectly functional ~/mydir

And on a second machine:

mac2> cd ~ ; ln -s Dropbox/MyDropboxDir ./mydir

Makes a perfectly functional ~/mydir as well. Any changes made in ~/mydir on mac1 show up (both from Finder and from the command line) in ~/mydir on mac2. And vice versa.

Of course, Dropbox/myDropboxDir should be set to sync.

I think this effectively provides all of the functionality one might want using symbolilc links with Dropbox. For example, it provides a way to have ~/src and ~/bin synchronized across machines.