Symlink your Documents folder with your Dropbox folder
by Webantix on Feb.05, 2010
When I found out about Dropbox I instantly fell in love with the idea as I have a Dual Boot Laptop and my work PC all running differnet OS’s. The problem I found with Dropbox was that I had all my files already in place in my Documents folder on my Ubuntu setup. I did not want to move all my files to the Dropbox so I thought i would symlink them.
OK well my introduction may of been a bit misleading but it is very close. I tried the symlink to the Documents folder but this did not upload the files to Dropbox. So I have moved all my files into the Dropbox folder and then symlinked it back to my Documents folder. If you are going to do this make sure that you do not include your Download folder in your Documents folder because i don’t know about you but my Download folder is pretty big with large files and ISO’s. This could fill up your free Dropbox account quickly.
to create this symlink I did the following.
First I had to move all the files over to the new Dropbox folder. Once this had been done you have to remove your Documents folder.
Now type the following command into your terminal.
ln -s /home/user/Dropbox /home/user/Documents
Now if you navigate to your Documents folder you will see all your synced Dropbox items.
Resources
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_link
http://wiki.dropbox.com/
Leave a Reply
-
Welcome to Webantix!
Home of Duncan Alderson, Security Gopher. Thanks for landing here! Feel free to comment on my posts good or bad we all need to learn more. You can also stay updated by subscribing to the RSS feed. See you later!
-
Follow Webantix
September 9th, 2010 on 6:45 am
thank you for sharing this information and helping to get the word out about how to properly set up symlinks if you wish to sync files & folders outside of the Dropbox folder. Although I love Dropbox and the dev team works really hard over there, they left the user forums unmonitored in the beginning which allowed a lot of erroneous information and half-baked tips n tricks to make it out into the wild, which in turn has had people coming back, having acted on the erroneous info they picked up in the forum, which caused them a bunch problems. And of course, it’s nothing but complaining and blaming Dropbox for what really amounts to their own error.
The most helpful way to look at and understand this is illustrated in your example – because Dropbox is the common element amongst all the devices you sync with, the service is almost essentially a client-server (or, going old school – master-slave) set up. Dropbox is the master and all your devices syncing to it are slaves/clients. Dropbox should always be the master storehouse – or keeper of The Truth – of data.
I have the exact same set up as you describe above – I moved my entire Documents folder into Dropbox (my path is just a little different ~/Dropbox/Documents ) on each device I was going to sync, setting up a symlink pointing to the Dropbox location. This was especially important on my Mac boxes because, even though it violates Apple’s published protocols to do this without explicit user permission, some applications save directly to the Documents folders.
So, anybody out there considering symlinks, keep this in mind. Move your data from its original location into Dropbox, putting symlinks that point to Dropbox behind. Doing it the other way, symlinks in Dropbox that point to data you want synced that is outside of Dropbox will lead to trouble in the long run.