Dropbox has been my preferred cloud-based storage system for quite some time. Whether it’s sharing files with other devices or sending large files, it makes the task very easy. Better still, it has been designed to work on any platform like iOS and macOS Sierra.
Downloading Dropbox. Your Dropbox download should automatically start within seconds. Once the download finishes, click Run to start installing Dropbox. Symbolic links in Mac have been around for quite a while, and beyond doubt, they’ve been extremely useful. With the popularity of cloud storage services, particularly ones like Dropbox that sync files and folders from your hard disk directly to your online drive, it only makes sense that the usability scenarios for Symbolic Links will increase.
Just a couple of days back, I found Dropbox missing from Favorites in Finder. It took me some time to bring it back in the sidebar under Favorites. The prime reason why I like to keep Dropbox in Favorites is to be able to access it a bit easily. Here is how you can quickly add this cloud-based app to Favorites in Finder on your Mac.
How to Add Dropbox to Favorites in Finder Sidebar on your Mac
Step #1. First off, open Finder on your Mac.
Step #2. Next, you need to click on the drive, in this case, Macintosh HD.
Step #3. Now, you have to click on Users.
Step #4. Click on your Username.
Step #5. Finally, you need to locate the Dropbox folder and drag it to the sidebar under Favorites.
That’s it!
If you wish to remove DropBox from finder sidebar, right click on DropBox and click on “Remove from Sidebar.”
There are a number of popular cloud storage services like OneDrive, Box, Google Drive, Amazon Cloud Drive, iCloud Drive (only for Apple ecosystem). However, Dropbox is found to be the most user-friendly by a lot of users.
One of the reasons why it excels is that it works seamlessly on Macs, PCs, iOS and Android. The hassle-free sharing across devices gives it an edge over others.
You can quickly set it up. Better still, it lets you access your files from Dropbox’s website or Dropbox applications for Mac, iOS effortlessly.
It provides free storage up to 2GB and $10/month for 1TB.
List Of Dropbox Links
Which is your favorite cloud-based services and why? Share your views about it.
Dorkometer: 6/10. Originally published Sep 29, 2013. Updated Feb 19, 2020.
So Dropbox has changed everything and no longer supports symlinks to external folders. That was the silver lining on the dark cloud of their baffling lack of support for internal symlinks. Now they turned that cloud inside out! The dark cloud is now the silver lining, and the silver lining is now dark cloud. 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. In still more words (because there’s exactly nothing “intuitive” about any of this)…
The two features
- Internal symlinks — Symlinks in Dropbox to files/folders inside Dropbox.
- External symlinks — Symlinks in Dropbox to files/folders outside Dropbox.
From early Dropbox to mid-2019:
- Internal symlinks — Janky! Symlinks were not preserved. Instead, Dropbox would try to resolve the symlink, replace it with whatever it was linked to… with some very unpredictable results, including data loss. Many people got burned by this, and their frustration made this article popular for many years.
- External symlinks — Functional and useful, but they also never actually supported it. It was an unofficial “hey, weird, that works!”
Since mid-2019…
- Internal symlinks — Supported! “It just works.” Finally!
- External symlinks — Just gone. Poof.
The use case for external symlinking was that it was really nice to symlink to the macOS ~/Sites folder. 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. It worked that way for a good decade.
Fortunately, it is possible to do exactly the same thing another way. Apache can be told to use any folder, anywhere. Just set your Document Root like so:
DocumentRoot '/Users/you/Dropbox/Sites'
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.
“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. And has been for many years now. And it’s not easy to explain…
Handy: Symlinks to folders outside Dropbox
Dropbox resolves symbolic links (symlinks, soft link) by default. 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.
This works great for syncing folders outside your Dropbox! It is an obscure feature-not-a-bug. 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. 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”). But in the cloud, the wholes Docs folder shows up in place of the symlink.
This is organizationally super handy if you want to sync a non-Dropbox folder. 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. 1
Janky: Symlinks to folders inside Dropbox
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. That is, if you need your symlinks to be symlinks, and not just dumb copies of the data they point to. This has been the case for many years now, and probably always will.
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.
But 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. The problem is clear: on Dropbox servers, up there in the cloud, there never was any symlink to begin with. Dropbox simply doesn’t sync pointers-as-pointers.
Inconsistent but inevitable
The destruction of symlinks by Dropbox has been surprisingly inconsistent for me. I have internal symlinks that seem to sync just fine for quite a while. And then I have others that clearly get replaced by copies of the data they point to.2
But symlink destruction is inevitable, and it will happen silently. Even if you think you’ve got it licked for a while, you’re going to wake up one day and realize that a critical symlink has been replaced by duplicate data … which is also hopelessly out of sync.
How To Share Dropbox File Link
So what to do? What if you absolutely, positively have to sync a symlink “as is”?
Don’t use Dropbox. There may be other services that will handle symlinks differently and better for many common needs.
Many awesome Dropbox use cases have died for lack of this feature
Should Dropbox fix this? Can they? As of fall 2013, there was a feature request (now defunct, though you can still find references to it) with ~2700 votes and 62 comments. My comment was, “Many awesome Dropbox use cases have died for lack of this feature.” In 2012, Andrew wrote:
Dear Dropbox,
STOP DESTROYING MY SYMBOLIC LINKS.
With love,Software Developers
The explanation for the situation is fairly clear, though: because the way things work right now supports linking to external folders, which is an extremely handy power-user feature. Which relies on resolving symlinks! I assume the trick isn’t so much getting Dropbox to sync links as-is, but doing so without sacrificing the external linking option.
The only general solution I can imagine would be an (advanced!) per-item setting … which is not exactly Dropbox’s style. Symlinks can be be a bit of a mindfuck on their own; imagine how confusing things could get if some symlinks as are synced as-is, while selected others resolve, and the only way to tell was the state of a switch in the cloud … or data loss if you get it wrong! Eep.
Why, Dropbox, why?
I found this explanation quoted by Aurelio Jargas in 2012:
Unfortunately this is a design decision that we made a very long time ago. There is no notion of symlinks in the Dropbox system (Windows XP didn't support symlinks) so our solution was to sync all the data within symlinks as if they were actual folders anyway. — Rian H., Dropbox employee
In addition to the fact that resolving symlinks has a major side benefit, that’s probably the main, original reason for the design. Thanks a bunch, Windows XP! Still fucking with us, for 17 years and counting…
For instance, this method it’s critical for a folder like the Sites folder on a Mac, which has to be in a specific location to work. If you want to sync a Sites folder with Dropbox, you have no choice: you have to link to it, and Dropbox must resolve the link. Which it does. ↩
In one case, in a 4-Mac scenario, two of them have synced healthy, functioning symlinks … and two have destructively replaced them with copies of the linked folders. I have some ideas what the difference is, but ultimately the details aren’t really important unless there’s some symlinks-as-symlinks configuration that actually works, which there probably isn’t. I haven’t found and no one has reported to me in the many years this article has been getting a fair bit of traffic. ↩