You might see that the Dropbox Community team have been busy working on some major updates to the Community itself! So, here is some info on what’s changed, what’s staying the same and what you can expect from the Dropbox Community overall.
Forum Discussion
Hardlinks in dropbox folder
Now that Dropbox has stopped supporting symlinks within Dropbox folder (to folders outside Dropbox), my setup no longer works. I wonder if hard links from within Dropbox to folders outside Dropbox would work, meaning that they would sync. Or would Dropbox ignore the external folder?
Hi mtozsu,
You are welcome.
Just to note: In "very system dependent" I don't mean OS! First of all to be able you must have corresponding permissions. Regular user don't have. Next, as I already noted, hard link and soft link are very different things. Soft link is on top level of your entire file system structure, so can point to, almost, everywhere and there are no too much additional requirements. Hard link is, in fact, change in the FS, so corresponding support have to be! In this context such a "link"s could "point" to FS entries inside particular partition, link from inside don't know anything about other places (drives/partitions and so on). Typically any abstraction layer above the native FS make hard linking imposible. And many other details could have some effect, so very important is the entire setup details. Generally hard linking is not best solution. You can try directory binding or 'opposite sym link' (actual directory inside, pointer outside). :wink:
Hope this helps.
I have a folder in my ~/Documents folder -- let us call it Papers (so ~/Documents/Papers). Now I create a hard link to it in my Dropbox folder so it is ~/Dropbox/Papers. Now I go and add a file to (or edit a file in) ~/Documents/Papers -- will Dropbox recognize the hard link and sync the changes? It no longer does this with symlinks; the question is whether it would do it with hardlinks...
Noted, thank you.
I should have checked whether I could create a hardlink first -- it turns out I cannot on a Mac.
suggestion, why dont you store everything in the dropbox folder, and then symbolic link from the location you want back to the DropBox folder?
That way the user experience doesnt change, it also is a good visual check on what you have backed up, because from windows explorer you will be able to see that each folder is a symbolic link and therefore the data is backed up automatiacally.
It is just a small change in setup, and you can have your data on a differnt hard drive.
If you use hard links, it must be on the same hard drive.
