Using Symbolic Links to Sync Dropbox and other Cloud Storage Services

As you may know, Dropbox is an awesome solution for syncing files. It CAN serve as a backup as well although it could get costly since you max at 1TB at the writing of this article. Anything above that, and you will need to go to the business account which is unlimited but there is a minimum of 5 users.

UPDATED 12/27/19

Here is what I do:

So I have my own folder structure and DO NOT want to put it under the “Dropbox Folder”. I use a symbolic link. I run macOS Mojave but this should run on any decent version of macOS and/or Linux. Not sure on Windows.

So lets say that I have a folder located on my MacBook that lives

Users/mannyfernandez/Documents/Stuff

And I want to automatically sync the contents of this folder to Dropbox.

ln -s /Users/mannyfernandez/Documents/Stuff /Users/mannyfernandez/Dropbox

Assumptions: You Dropbox folder is at that location and you did not place it somewhere else. I did this same operation for my company docs. Nothing classified, just forms etc.

lrwxr-xr-x 1 mannyfernandez staff 50 Dec 2 12:42 Work -> /Users/mannyfernandez/Data/Documents/Work
-rw-r--r--@ 1 mannyfernandez staff 0 Dec 13 00:05 Icon?
drwxr-xr-x@ 112 mannyfernandez staff 3584 Nov 21 16:03 MEMEs
drwxr-xr-x@ 9 mannyfernandez staff 288 Dec 9 11:34 ScanSnap
drwxr-xr-x@ 13 mannyfernandez staff 416 Dec 14 11:48 Shared

You can see that the first item has a ‘->’ on it and a path, this tells you it is a symbolic link.

Update:

Seems that Dripbox (yes I know I spelled it wrong), has decided to not only remove the workaround stated above, but not provide an option for users that are using symbolic links.  I already pay for Office 365 which included OneDrive and iCloud Drive that also does not support symbolic links.  Why would I want to pay for an additional storage / sync solution with the same limitation.

I am still working on getting a fix for this.  Please check back.