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
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.
So I received the symlink email today as well. I'm incredibly frustrated by this change, as symlinks are a feature I use every day.
Many Mac users have a small main boot drive (SSD) and larger files on an external drive (HDD). Using a symlink, I have been able to keep some folders from my external drive synced to DropBox without problems for many years. For my other computers I just used Selective Sync to not sync those folders; assuming they also have small SSD drives.
The link in the email goes to a page that says this change happened in mid-2019. Yet my symlinks are still working fine today.
When will this change go into effect?
As a Dropbox Business Advanced subscriber, I have to say that the direction DropBox has been heading in is very disappointing to me. Examples:
- Major feature reduction to timeline based Photo/Video browsing (especially iPad). This was a feature I used daily.
- Major development resources spent on "integration" with workflow tools I don't care about (we use none of them).
- Disabling symlink functionality. This is a feature I use heavily.
- Ongoing price increases while features we use are removed.
Very frustrating. DropBox is the most stable and reliable cloud file syncing service currently available. This is the only reason my company is still a customer. But I feel like you are trying to become a different company and maybe don't really want customers like us anymore.
For now my symlinks still work. I guess I'll reassess after this change actually takes effect.
The change took effect. My symlinks no longer work. The symlink itself appears as a file now. The folder that was symlinked is now renamed as follows:
example old name: "Architectural Files"
new name: "Architectural Files (Symlink Backup Copy)"
This renamed folder is set to not sync. So at least it didn't fill my hard drive. So now my files are out of sync.
This is going to be a huge waste of time for me as I re-organize my files and storage devices or move to a new provider. I wonder what important feature Dropbox will remove next.
I am a very annoyed Dropbox Business Advanced customer :-(
I wanted to follow up on where I landed with the symlink change along with a solution using rclone. It might be helpful to someone else.
so sad...
