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Forum Discussion
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 ...
Jay
Dropbox Staff
Dropbox StaffHi 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.
- Rich
Super User II
neilcothran wrote:
The use of symlinks seems to work quite well, except for the "update" bug I originally mentioned.
It's not a bug. When Dropbox is installed, it registers itself with the operating system to be notified of file changes within the Dropbox folder. It doesn't sync files at the other end of a symlink in real-time because the operating system isn't notifying Dropbox of those changes (because it's outside of Dropbox). It does sync when you force it to because Dropbox then scans all of the files in the Dropbox folder for changes, and when it reaches the symlink it follows it to the other end, scans the files and detects the changes.
- 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!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.
