Dropbox is an impressive piece of software that I’ve played around with in the past but never gave much thought to. I’ve recently been re-introduced to it as a way to share documents with people I work with. It’s a great way to share the most up-to-date version of documents and other resources without an endless and messy email trail. With Dropbox it’s as simple as placing a document into the shared folder and ‘poof’ it gets synchronized across all computers connected.
This led me to start thinking about syncing some other folders I use for work so that I’d have constant access to them from any computer or my mobile phone. The problems I ran into were: a) files must be in the Dropbox folder b) my entire folder was 5GB+. Dropbox offers 2GB of storage for free, but wants $10/month to upgrade that to 50GB. I find the pricing structure a little expensive. I overcame this second problem by electing to only sync the folders I will be actively using over the next few months, thus reducing the size substantially. However the first problem still existed: I didn’t want to have to move the files I wanted to sync into the Dropbox folder — they needed to live in their sub-folder structure within my main documents folder. I knew there had to be a way to create an alias or linked folder inside the Dropbox that points back to the main folder. The trick is that a simple alias or shortcut doesn’t actually work, you need to create a symbolic link.
Lifehacker covered this exact issue in a great article that points to the Dropbox wiki. The beauty part is that someone has created an automator script (for mac) that lets me right-click and create a symbolic link of any folder I want. I can then place the symbolic link inside the Dropbox folder and everything stays put and in sync.
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