Dropbox simply doesn’t sync pointers-as-pointers. The problem is clear: on Dropbox servers, up there in the cloud, there never was any symlink to begin with. Internal symlinks might seem to work out at first, depending on how you are set up: you might see a symlink on both device A and B, as you hope.īut Dropbox does not support your intent, and sooner or later it’s going to replace your symlink with a copy of the file or folder it points to, which is pure pain. This has been the case for many years now, and probably always will. That is, if you need your symlinks to be symlinks, and not just dumb copies of the data they point to. Things get weird (and bad) if you create a symlink in your Dropbox to data in your Dropbox - “internal” symlinks - and you don’t want those symlinks to resolve. 1 Janky: Symlinks to folders inside Dropbox Sometimes you don’t want to move a folder into Dropbox just because you’d rather have it somewhere else, or it has to be somewhere else. This is organizationally super handy if you want to sync a non-Dropbox folder. But in the cloud, the wholes Docs folder shows up in place of the symlink. On your synced computers, the symlink continues to look and act like a symlink file in Dropbox (on a Mac, for instance, it looks like an “alias”). For instance, you can put a link to your Documents folder in your Dropbox, and it will follow the link and sync the contents of your Documents folder like a boss. This works great for syncing folders outside your Dropbox! It is an obscure feature-not-a-bug. On Dropbox servers, symlinks are completely replaced by the data they point to, so that you have the actual data in the cloud - not just a pointer to it. And it’s not easy to explain… Handy: Symlinks to folders outside Dropboxĭropbox resolves symbolic links (symlinks, soft link) by default. “Dear Dropbox,” a frustrated user wrote to Dropbox long ago, “STOP DESTROYING MY SYMBOLIC LINKS.” What does this mean? Dropbox’s handling of symlinks is fantastic feature for one common purpose … but a janky, data-wrecking horror show otherwise. The rest of the page is the original post, preserved for posterity, so we can look back on the weird old days when a symlink in Dropbox was like a turd in an elevator. Apache can be told to use any folder, anywhere. It worked that way for a good decade.įortunately, it is possible to do exactly the same thing another way. That way you could have your webdev projects in Sites, as is only natural and right, but the files could still be synced as if they were still in Dropbox. The use case for external symlinking was that it was really nice to symlink to the macOS ~/Sites folder. Internal symlinks - Supported! “It just works.” Finally!. It was an unofficial “hey, weird, that works!” External symlinks - Functional and useful, but they also never actually supported it.Many people got burned by this, and their frustration made this article popular for many years. Instead, Dropbox would try to resolve the symlink, replace it with whatever it was linked to… with some very unpredictable results, including data loss. Internal symlinks - Janky! Symlinks were not preserved.External symlinks - Symlinks in Dropbox to files/folders outside Dropbox.Internal symlinks - Symlinks in Dropbox to files/folders inside Dropbox.In still more words (because there’s exactly nothing “intuitive” about any of this)… In other words, the basic useful thing they mysteriously didn’t support now finally works as we wished it would for so many years… but our consolation prize disappeared at the same time. Now they turned that cloud inside out! The dark cloud is now the silver lining, and the silver lining is now dark cloud. That was the silver lining on the dark cloud of their baffling lack of support for internal symlinks. So Dropbox has changed everything and no longer supports symlinks to external folders.
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