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.
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...
