Dropbox no longer follows symlinks to items outside of your Dropbox account

I see multiple comments here saying that this is unfortunate because people were using symlinks in order to automatically have backups of program configurations etc.<p>But the solution is simple, just switch around which is the real file and which is the symlink.<p>So where you used to have symlinks like<p><pre><code> ~&#x2F;Dropbox&#x2F;.bashrc -&gt; ~&#x2F;.bashrc ~&#x2F;Dropbox&#x2F;.vim —&gt; ~&#x2F;.vim&#x2F; </code></pre> and so on, remove the old symlinks and place the real files in ~&#x2F;Dropbox&#x2F; and then symlink the other locations there.<p><pre><code> ~&#x2F;.bashrc -&gt; ~&#x2F;Dropbox&#x2F;.bashrc ~&#x2F;.vim -&gt; ~&#x2F;Dropbox&#x2F;.vim&#x2F; </code></pre> and so on.<p>This is similar to what I do with some of my files in ~&#x2F;bin&#x2F;<p>Many of the files I have in my ~&#x2F;bin&#x2F; are symlinks to files that live in git repositories.<p>For example, I have a few “alias commands” (shell scripts that wrap a longer command) in ~&#x2F;bin&#x2F;<p><pre><code> ~&#x2F;bin&#x2F;st -&gt; ..&#x2F;src&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ctsrc&#x2F;shell-command-aliases&#x2F;bin&#x2F;st </code></pre> (Aside: Why not aliases in my bashrc, you ask? Because I use a few different operating systems and eventually realized that rather than trying to unify OS specifics and shared aliases in bashrc it was much simpler to maintain the aliases as wrapping shell scripts.)

This is one of the most important reasons I&#x27;ve kept using Dropbox despite having a much larger storage space on Google Drive or elsewhere. Dropbox once had superior handling of symlinks that deals with plenty of weird edge cases gracefully. I don&#x27;t think I have any reason to use Dropbox any more.

Why does Dropbox just keep jumping the shark? Every fricken turn breaks something for me. This breaks the entire way I have my systems set up.<p>They were amazing software and now they’ve eroded away most of it such that they have very little over their competitors.<p>At this point the only reason I stay is they sync macOS extended file tags and comments; both things I make heavy use of. To my knowledge Syncthing doesn’t, nor Google Drive for that matter.

Dropbox is still OK for easily sharing files with other, especially movies and stuff that its sharing web UI supports.<p>But in 2019 it is basically an inferior and antiquated tool for syncing your own files.<p>I moved to the open-source SyncThing[1] some years ago, which gave me:<p>1.) the ability to sync any arbitrary set of folders I want, which of course completely obviates the need to care about things like this issue (i.e., no need to use symlinks to sync other folders, because you can just sync those folders themselves)<p>2.) the ability to actually sync folders that <i>contain symlinks</i>, as many types of software projects do (Dropbox and many other purported sync tools can&#x27;t do that, which means there are many common types of folder that they can&#x27;t sync without corrupting them by replacing the symlink with the contents of the symlink destination) EDIT: Or, have they fixed that now, and is that why they are making this announcement? I am not sure. Back when I used Dropbox for syncing, it couldn&#x27;t sync a folder containing a symlink, but this may no longer be true. (?)<p>3.) better sync reliability<p>4.) better sync performance<p>5.) completely superior security story; end-to-end encryption means you are in control of who can access your files (no access for employees, governments, etc)<p>The tradeoffs are:<p>a.) a little bit more work to set up (but it&#x27;s really just a <i>little</i> bit... I walked my dad through it over the phone... basically the same amount of work as getting your credit card billing setup on Dropbox)<p>b.) weaker story on mobile, no iOS app<p>c.) no &quot;cloud&quot; so you have to do your own (e.g., leave an iMac running 24&#x2F;7 back at your house or something)<p>All in all, after 2+ years I am extremely happy with Syncthing, and I don&#x27;t think products like Dropbox have a very strong case to exist anymore, at least not for the original purpose of syncing folders full of computer files.<p>That problem has now been solved better, way more securely, and for free. (Which is probably why Dropbox seems to be trying to pivot to become some kind of enterprise team commmunication hub.)<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;syncthing.net" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;syncthing.net</a> (if on a Mac just install the Mac app and it will install the other components for you)

I moved to Syncthing when they asked me to move to ext4.<p>I&#x27;m glad I did. Now my phone and tablet are first class citizens when syncing and I can have multiple roots shared between different devices. I wish I switched earlier.

Maybe one of the most wanted feature in Dropbox (at least among developers) is a .dropboxignore file[0].<p>When Dropbox stops syncing symlinks to outside files and directories, the situations becomes a lot better. Placing node_modules&#x2F; or venv&#x2F; directories outside the the dropbox and just placing a symlink here, makes Dropbox a good option for code backups, again.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dropboxforum.com&#x2F;t5&#x2F;Dropbox&#x2F;Ignore-folder-without-selective-sync&#x2F;idi-p&#x2F;5926" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dropboxforum.com&#x2F;t5&#x2F;Dropbox&#x2F;Ignore-folder-withou...</a>

My intuition says that Dropbox should never have followed (soft) links outside the &#x27;boundaries&#x27; of the sync folder. It never occurred to me to expect it to work like that.<p>I have, however, use folders under Dropbox to sync local files into (make a change, sync over into Db); or even have a Db folder for git repos added as a remote (commit a change, git push dropbox branch.)

What I don&#x27;t understand about Dropbox in 2019 is that they are trying to limit features known to work without any issues. What&#x27;s worse is that they do this with no particular reasons or explanations.<p>Why they are doing this recently?

Finally! A symlink is a file like any other. You don&#x27;t want sync software going off and &quot;thinking&quot; about what a symlink really means, anymore than you&#x27;d want sync software going off and &quot;thinking&quot; after finding porn on your computer. It is a user&#x27;s responsibility to insure that a symlink is useful across sync&#x27;d computers, or to ignore the symlink.<p>A good test case is a MacOS Application Package. These often have internal symlinks that most users never notice, e.g. from &quot;current&quot; to a version of included software. A sync program that replaces the symlink with its contents simply bloats such an application, but it still works. A sync program that ignores a symlink breaks the application. In either case the mistake is &quot;thinking&quot; about the symlink rather than treating it like any other file.<p>There&#x27;s still only one sync program that I know of that handles every issue like this correctly: Unison, written by a prominent computer scientist with astute community feedback. This is collectively a smarter brain trust than the sanctimonious support folks who have resisted my feedback at various sync software companies, sure that their unique approach is correct. Not only does Unison correctly handle symlinks, it also has a notion of an &quot;atomic&quot; directory, so that one doesn&#x27;t for example hose a git archive modified at both ends, or a sparse disk image modified at both ends.<p>I use DropBox when I need the integration, to iOS or sharing with others. I sync the guts of each machine, for my private work, using Unison.

Well, there goes my whole workflow of backing up my graphic projects into dropbox from their original location on our local server ...

Primary reason for me to pay for Dropbox is symlinked files that act as a backup and remote file access.

How is this different from before? All my symlinks reside at odd (but convenient for me) locations in my file system outside my Dropbox folder. They all point to locations <i>inside</i> my Dropbox folder. Everything works perfectly, unless I make the mistake of creating a symlink inside Dropbox that points out; those have always exhibited strange behavior so I stopped using them long ago.

If it&#x27;s all on the same filesystem&#x2F;partition you could use hard links instead, including on Windows (NTFS only though, and based on reading just now I&#x27;d forgotten that it&#x27;s files-only).<p>It would also be interesting to see if on Windows it handles Junctions as hard links or soft - basically does this only affect shortcuts on Windows or also catch the less used filesystem option.

Any alternative suggestions? SyncThing that is discussed here seems to need you to manage your own always-on system, which I suppose can be implemented via a cloud server?<p>I&#x27;ve been using Dropbox for years but this change means I need to re-organise, so may as well look at other options at the same time. I really enjoy the ease of right-click to share, if any other service has replicated that.

well, fuck.<p>The only reason i have dropbox on my workstation is so that i can<p><pre><code> ln -s &#x2F;media&#x2F;user&#x2F;ssd_drive&#x2F;results&#x2F;bigstupidfile.tar.gz ~&#x2F;Dropbox&#x2F;user&#x2F; </code></pre> and then share that link.

That&#x27;s too bad, thanks for the heads up. I use symlinks for the figures of my LaTeX papers, the actual figure resides with the scripts and data that generate the figure (many GBs usually) and in Dropbox I only have very lightweight text files and symlinks. That way I know my figures are always up to data with the data when compiling.

Any alternative suggestions? SyncThing that is discussed here seems to need you to manage your own always-on system, which I suppose can be implemented via a cloud server?<p>I&#x27;ve been using Dropbox for years but this change means I need to re-organise, so may as well look at other options at the same time.

For us techies this can be a big deal, but the vast majority of users do not even know what symlink is.<p>Personally I&#x27;m moving to Resilio Sync since these days I only use Dropbox to sync prefs and some files between devices. The idea of sharing the same folder between many users can be disastrous.

Couldn&#x27;t Dropbox have let you choose the behaviour you want? :&#x2F;

Alternative headline: Dropbox is dying, consider moving your data soon.

How did it work with shared folders prior to this? Has there been an attack vector utilizing symlinks in shared folders, making other users&#x27; clients sync files from their drives?

I have a relatively simple use case, but I get around this by having all my folders in Dropbox and setting up symlinks outside Dropbox that point to the folders in Dropbox.<p>If you want to sync default MacOS folders that you can&#x27;t delete in Finder (Pictures, Movies etc.) you can delete them using sudo in terminal and recreate them as symlinks. I&#x27;ve even done that with Desktop (I just keep plain text files there) and it&#x27;s been working fine for a few years now.

I moved back to SpiderOak from Dropbox because although it saves symlinks as the link files as well (not the files they point to), it supports both backup and sync separately as part of job definitions and I don&#x27;t have to worry about how it interprets filesystems across the OSes it supports.<p>Being able to backup my home directory in its entirety and sync a subset of it (ex code projects) between machines is handy.

I once tried to symlink from my personal folder to a team folder in a Corporate Dropbox account. The reason was because I wanted the Dropbox App I created to upload files to the Team directory but I could only create the app from my user.<p>The result was continual sync, 100% cpu and growing RAM use (past 20GB). I had to eventually delete the link and just copy the files over manually when they were done being created.

For anyone that uses Linux, I think a simple ssh server should be fine for their needs. What then is a tool or daemon that watches a directory and runs scp or rsync when a file changes?

This is unfortunate. I have symlinks in dropbox to sync certain application config and dot files on Linux. I guess I&#x27;ll have to use a proper dot file solution or another tool.

Anyone know why they are doing this? It disappoints me as I use this functionality to keep files synced between devices. What&#x27;s Dropbox&#x27;s reasoning for this?

I didn&#x27;t use Dropbox in this way (and I realise actually I should use symlinks more) but why would they change this behaviour?

Seems dropbox keeps dropping features or adding irrelevant stuff, when was the last time dropbox added something really useful?

For each one of these announcements, I’m increasingly glad I decided to setup my own Nextcloud-instance.

Why not just make this configurable?

Too bad. How does Dropbox keep the premium pricing when they increasingly lack premium features?

Make a hardlink instead? Needs more oversight, but not as visible to DropBox.

That is incorrect? I just tried and it works just fine on my Linux host.<p>As long as the symlink is inside the ~&#x2F;Dropbox folder, pointing to a file&#x2F;folder also inside the ~&#x2F;Dropbox folder, it works. I can open the file&#x2F;Folder when tapping on the symlink on mobile Dropbox.