14 ms·

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

202 points by whoisnnamdi 7y ago

frereubu 7y ago
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. If you want to sync default MacOS folders that you can't delete in Finder (Pictures, Movies etc.) you can delete them using sudo in terminal and recreate them as symlinks. I've even done that with Desktop (I just keep plain text files there) and it's been working fine for a few years now.
djklanac 7y ago
Primary reason for me to pay for Dropbox is symlinked files that act as a backup and remote file access.
- hnarayanan 7y ago
  Me too. Need to find an alternative.
JorgeGT 7y ago
That'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.
TheChaplain 7y ago
That is incorrect? I just tried and it works just fine on my Linux host. As long as the symlink is inside the ~/Dropbox folder, pointing to a file/folder also inside the ~/Dropbox folder, it works. I can open the file/Folder when tapping on the symlink on mobile Dropbox.
- frereubu 7y ago
  That's what the linked article says. It makes a distinction between a symlink in your Dropbox folder that points to another item in your Dropbox folder (syncs both symlink and target) and a symlink that points to another item outside your Dropbox folder (only syncs the symlink).
  - Dylan16807 7y ago
    That's not really a distinction. It always syncs just a symlink now. If the target is inside Dropbox then it gets synced by virtue of being in Dropbox, not because a symlink points to it.
dietr1ch 7y ago
I moved to Syncthing when they asked me to move to ext4. I'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.
- jplayer01 7y ago
  Syncthing is great and has become a core part of my workflow. It's just really annoying that there's no iOS client. So I have this great sync service that only works across my Android phone, laptop and desktop, while my iPhone and iPad are stuck outside the loop. Which means I have to duplicate some of my workflow onto another service.
- mickael-kerjean 7y ago
  Syncthing is only for the sync component of Dropbox. If you have an always on node for syncthing and miss the web UI component of Dropbox along with the shared links and full text search, I've built Filestash: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash
  - veidr 7y ago
    Hey, awesome, dude! Been looking for something just like this, and will definitely try it. The only thing that bugs me about my Syncthing setup is that it's annoying to find a file in one of my sync'd folders from my phone (which is iOS, so no Syncthing client). I don't do that much, but every once in a while you really want to — and in modern times, we mainly want to find files via searching for file content. This looks great, and I will definitely try it tonight!
  - _fzslm 7y ago
    this is great! installing tonight
  - jazoom 7y ago
    I'm trying to understand what this is. So it's not storing any data? It is a web app that is capable of displaying data/files on other servers via the many listed protocols?
veidr 7y ago
Dropbox is still OK for easily sharing files with other, especially movies and stuff that its sharing web UI supports. But in 2019 it is basically an inferior and antiquated tool for syncing your own files. I moved to the open-source SyncThing[1] some years ago, which gave me: 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) 2.) the ability to actually sync folders that contain symlinks, as many types of software projects do (Dropbox and many other purported sync tools can't do that, which means there are many common types of folder that they can'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't sync a folder containing a symlink, but this may no longer be true. (?) 3.) better sync reliability 4.) better sync performance 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) The tradeoffs are: a.) a little bit more work to set up (but it's really just a little 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) b.) weaker story on mobile, no iOS app c.) no "cloud" so you have to do your own (e.g., leave an iMac running 24/7 back at your house or something) All in all, after 2+ years I am extremely happy with Syncthing, and I don'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. 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.) [1] https://syncthing.net https://syncthing.net (if on a Mac just install the Mac app and it will install the other components for you)
- kranner 7y ago
  > c.) no "cloud" so you have to do your own (e.g., leave an iMac running 24/7 back at your house or something) > That problem has now been solved better, way more securely, and for free. You haven't accounted for the cost and maintenance of the 24/7 iMac (or VPS) if one doesn't already have that, and not everyone does. I'm also a happy SyncThing user but I wouldn't say it's as easy to use as Dropbox for the general user.
telesilla 7y ago
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? I'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.
- OJFord 7y ago
  Syncthing is great. It's peer to peer, so peers only sync if another peer is also online; some people 'solve' that by having an always on server as a peer, but it's not a requirement. If you do have a server peer though, you can also use it to ensure that there's a second copy of all synchronised folders (other peers can safely have different subsets), and thus as the one place from which you can take snapshots to backup elsewhere. (Syncthing does have versioning a la Dropbox, but IMO just like Dropbox it's more about sharing between people/devices, and an automated regular snapshot should also be taken.)
- jay_kyburz 7y ago
  I wonder if there is a business there for some startup to host the always on part for SyncThing users.
  - erichocean 7y ago
    Yes.
- zackkatz 7y ago
  https://www.arqbackup.com/ https://www.arqbackup.com/ Works with a bunch of providers and is really solid.
telesilla 7y ago
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? I'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.
- duckerude 7y ago
  You don't need a server for Syncthing. Devices synchronize when they're both connected. It's decentralized. But Syncthing doesn't let you share a link to a file. For that there might be OwnCloud-based solutions.
- yosamino 7y ago
  It doesn't really require an always-on-system. That depends a little bit on what you use it for. For example I use it to synchronize the photos from my phone to my Laptop, whenever they can reach it other either by being on the same network or by connecting to the global syncthing "introducer" system, they start syncing. Having a "cloud" system becomes useful if you need to share a file with someone who's not online with you at the same time, which is a pretty big use-case I supposed. But that is a problem that any alternative that is software only will need to solve via some service. Nextcloud for example or also Seafile. Both have nice clients, but require some sort of server, whereas with syncthing the cloud part is optional.
- vegetablepotpie 7y ago
  I use ownCloud to sync files between my Windows and Linux computers. It’s pretty seamless and it’s a tool I’ve largely forgotten about and taken for granted. It does not meet your requirement of avoiding an always on system though, I run it on a home server.
- veidr 7y ago
  Yes, basically any $5/month VPS works great for Syncthing. The only thing I still do use Dropbox for is the share-with-whoever functionality, too. I'd be curious to hear about alternatives for that as well. (To me it seems pretty orthogonal to syncing folders across machines, though, and I'm fine with and probably prefer using different tools for that. Which I guess I am doing, since I use Syncthing for syncing and Dropbox for sharing.)
nullify88 7y ago
This is unfortunate. I have symlinks in dropbox to sync certain application config and dot files on Linux. I guess I'll have to use a proper dot file solution or another tool.
- climb_stealth 7y ago
  You could use them the other way around. Leave the dotfiles in your dropbox folder and symlink to them from your home directory. I keep my dotfiles in a private git repo that way.
TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
Couldn't Dropbox have let you choose the behaviour you want? :/
vortico 7y ago
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?
- nightfly 7y ago
  https://github.com/axkibe/lsyncd https://github.com/axkibe/lsyncd
kbumsik 7y ago
What I don't understand about Dropbox in 2019 is that they are trying to limit features known to work without any issues. What's worse is that they do this with no particular reasons or explanations. Why they are doing this recently?
- nashashmi 7y ago
  Could they be adding feature of synchronizing multiple folder paths? Or could they be changing the use case of the platform to sharing files instead of backing them up.
- criddell 7y ago
  If they can't explain how the change is an improvement or fix for some problem, then it probably isn't being done for the benefit of the customer.
- usaar333 7y ago
  Dropbox never before supported symlinks as symlinks. (It would sync the target folder even if the target was in Dropbox, duplicating data). Now symlinks are understood by the server, but ones targeting content outside Dropbox break.
codetrotter 7y ago
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. But the solution is simple, just switch around which is the real file and which is the symlink. So where you used to have symlinks like ~/Dropbox/.bashrc -> ~/.bashrc ~/Dropbox/.vim —> ~/.vim/ and so on, remove the old symlinks and place the real files in ~/Dropbox/ and then symlink the other locations there. ~/.bashrc -> ~/Dropbox/.bashrc ~/.vim -> ~/Dropbox/.vim/ and so on. This is similar to what I do with some of my files in ~/bin/ Many of the files I have in my ~/bin/ are symlinks to files that live in git repositories. For example, I have a few “alias commands” (shell scripts that wrap a longer command) in ~/bin/ ~/bin/st -> ../src/github.com/ctsrc/shell-command-aliases/bin/st (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.)
- Erlich_Bachman 7y ago
  This is not a "solution", this is at best a workaround. Moving around important system files and replacing them with symlinks means you are changing your system and everything in it just because one small program that doesn't want to play by the rules can do what it wants. The real solution is to use other software than Dropbox, that plays by the rules and cares about its users.
  - Nevermindmine 7y ago
    Why solution in quotes?
  - amelius 7y ago
    Perhaps a better solution is to use cron to rsync the system files to somewhere in your Dropbox tree. That at least gives you a one-way backup of these files. And you probably don't want to write these files in the other direction.
    - 7y ago
sebst 7y ago
Maybe one of the most wanted feature in Dropbox (at least among developers) is a .dropboxignore file[0]. When Dropbox stops syncing symlinks to outside files and directories, the situations becomes a lot better. Placing node_modules/ or venv/ directories outside the the dropbox and just placing a symlink here, makes Dropbox a good option for code backups, again. [0]: https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Dropbox/Ignore-folder-without-selective-sync/idi-p/5926 https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Dropbox/Ignore-folder-withou...
- GordonS 7y ago
  This is also one of the top voted feature requests on the UserVoice site for OneDrive - it's sat there for years with no action. I don't get why they wouldn't want to have this, given it would reduce the amount of data they have to store.
  - ledauphin 7y ago
    probably because they ultimately make their money off people who go over the free storage limit. storage hardware is incredibly cheap, relatively speaking, so for Dropbox the main thing is not reducing costs, it's convincing people to pay in the first place.
Legogris 7y ago
How did it work with shared folders prior to this? Has there been an attack vector utilizing symlinks in shared folders, making other users' clients sync files from their drives?
krsdcbl 7y ago
Well, there goes my whole workflow of backing up my graphic projects into dropbox from their original location on our local server ...
delinka 7y ago
My intuition says that Dropbox should never have followed (soft) links outside the 'boundaries' of the sync folder. It never occurred to me to expect it to work like that. 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.)
- nashashmi 7y ago
  Symlinks are a terrific way to duplicate the presence of files in multiple places. When Dropbox allowed Symlinks, and recommended Symlinks, it fundamentally changed the meaning of what Symlinks were. It focused it on its technique to emulate and a way to direct Dropbox to synchronize folders not necessarily in the Dropbox folder.
- Spivak 7y ago
  I think the ‘correct’ behavior for Dropbox is to just back up the symlink. It should be treated like it was any other file. Because now I can’t have a symlink in my Dropbox pointing to a machine-specific file outside the folder (like an env-vars file that’s different between MacOS and Linux)
m1sta_ 7y ago
Why not just make this configurable?
josteink 7y ago
For each one of these announcements, I’m increasingly glad I decided to setup my own Nextcloud-instance.
- Hamuko 7y ago
  I've been intending to setup my own after Dropbox emailed me about exceeding my device limit. Surely I'll get to it one day.
mkorfmann 7y ago
sensible change
hprotagonist 7y ago
well, fuck. The only reason i have dropbox on my workstation is so that i can ln -s /media/user/ssd_drive/results/bigstupidfile.tar.gz ~/Dropbox/user/ and then share that link.
kccqzy 7y ago
This is one of the most important reasons I'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't think I have any reason to use Dropbox any more.
- beambot 7y ago
  Didn't they already drop most Linux support?
  - JamesCoyne 7y ago
    They announced they were dropping support for several less common filesystems used by Linux, then they decided that was a bad move and recanted. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20498454 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20498454
    - josteink 7y ago
      > several less common filesystems Better make that all the popular non-ext4 filesystems, 2 of which are default filesystems on the 2 major Linux-distributions out there (Red hat & Ubuntu). What on earth were they thinking?
      - beambot 7y ago
        Including sane defaults, like encryped home directories using encryptfs on ext4.
        fencepost 7y ago
        Did they have to do hoop jumping with potential security ramifications to support those? Is Dropbox on Linux running entirely within the user account or is there a system level component of it with communication to a user level component? If the latter, I could see potential areas that could at least be probed for potential vulnerabilities.
MobileVet 7y ago
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. 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.
TheUndead96 7y ago
Alternative headline: Dropbox is dying, consider moving your data soon.
donatj 7y ago
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. They were amazing software and now they’ve eroded away most of it such that they have very little over their competitors. 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.
- Razengan 7y ago
  > * 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.* iCloud Drive does that too, and should be good enough if you stay within the Apple ecosystem, can’t say about support/reliability on other platforms.
  - donatj 7y ago
    > if you stay within the Apple ecosystem That’s the rub really. All my machines other than my main Laptop run Linux and my phone is Android. I’ve really set myself up for pain.
    - dddw 7y ago
      nono the companies who built the silos they want you to be in, they set you up for the pain deliberately
- nabla9 7y ago
  Most likely because they focus on different type of customers and trying to grow.
tyingq 7y ago
Make a hardlink instead? Needs more oversight, but not as visible to DropBox.
Syzygies 7y ago
Finally! A symlink is a file like any other. You don't want sync software going off and "thinking" about what a symlink really means, anymore than you'd want sync software going off and "thinking" after finding porn on your computer. It is a user's responsibility to insure that a symlink is useful across sync'd computers, or to ignore the symlink. A good test case is a MacOS Application Package. These often have internal symlinks that most users never notice, e.g. from "current" 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 "thinking" about the symlink rather than treating it like any other file. There'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 "atomic" directory, so that one doesn't for example hose a git archive modified at both ends, or a sparse disk image modified at both ends. 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.
dreamcompiler 7y ago
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 inside 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.
- eslaught 7y ago
  It used to be that if you created a symlink (even an internal symlink) it would result in storing a duplicate of the symlink target instead of the symlink itself. On the first machine, it would preserve the symlink, but on any subsequent machines it would store a copy of the file. You could restore the symlink by hand on other machines, and it wouldn't interfere with syncing, but you had to do it manually. With the old Dropbox, if you did the following: 1. machine A: clone a git repo that contains a symlink 2. machine B: wait for repo to sync 3. machine B: git status You'd see a "type change" in the git status output. If you did git checkout you'd get your symlink back and it wouldn't interfere with machine A. Which was all fine if you had your file contents synced in git or similar, but if you had it set up by hand it was a huge pain in the rear (because you'd have to locate the bad symlinks and restore by hand manually).
fiendsan 7y ago
Seems dropbox keeps dropping features or adding irrelevant stuff, when was the last time dropbox added something really useful?
Spooky23 7y ago
Too bad. How does Dropbox keep the premium pricing when they increasingly lack premium features?
mikorym 7y ago
I didn't use Dropbox in this way (and I realise actually I should use symlinks more) but why would they change this behaviour?
pier25 7y ago
For us techies this can be a big deal, but the vast majority of users do not even know what symlink is. Personally I'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.
fencepost 7y ago
If it's all on the same filesystem/partition you could use hard links instead, including on Windows (NTFS only though, and based on reading just now I'd forgotten that it's files-only). 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.
bsg75 7y ago
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't have to worry about how it interprets filesystems across the OSes it supports. Being able to backup my home directory in its entirety and sync a subset of it (ex code projects) between machines is handy.
dbg31415 7y ago
Anyone know why they are doing this? It disappoints me as I use this functionality to keep files synced between devices. What's Dropbox's reasoning for this?

202 points by whoisnnamdi 7y ago

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. If you want to sync default MacOS folders that you can't delete in Finder (Pictures, Movies etc.) you can delete them using sudo in terminal and recreate them as symlinks. I've even done that with Desktop (I just keep plain text files there) and it's been working fine for a few years now.

djklanac 7y ago

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

hnarayanan 7y ago
Me too. Need to find an alternative.

JorgeGT 7y ago

That'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.

TheChaplain 7y ago

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

frereubu 7y ago
That's what the linked article says. It makes a distinction between a symlink in your Dropbox folder that points to another item in your Dropbox folder (syncs both symlink and target) and a symlink that points to another item outside your Dropbox folder (only syncs the symlink).
- Dylan16807 7y ago
  That's not really a distinction. It always syncs just a symlink now. If the target is inside Dropbox then it gets synced by virtue of being in Dropbox, not because a symlink points to it.

dietr1ch 7y ago

I moved to Syncthing when they asked me to move to ext4. I'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.

jplayer01 7y ago
Syncthing is great and has become a core part of my workflow. It's just really annoying that there's no iOS client. So I have this great sync service that only works across my Android phone, laptop and desktop, while my iPhone and iPad are stuck outside the loop. Which means I have to duplicate some of my workflow onto another service.
mickael-kerjean 7y ago
Syncthing is only for the sync component of Dropbox. If you have an always on node for syncthing and miss the web UI component of Dropbox along with the shared links and full text search, I've built Filestash: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash
- veidr 7y ago
  Hey, awesome, dude! Been looking for something just like this, and will definitely try it. The only thing that bugs me about my Syncthing setup is that it's annoying to find a file in one of my sync'd folders from my phone (which is iOS, so no Syncthing client). I don't do that much, but every once in a while you really want to — and in modern times, we mainly want to find files via searching for file content. This looks great, and I will definitely try it tonight!
- _fzslm 7y ago
  this is great! installing tonight
- jazoom 7y ago
  I'm trying to understand what this is. So it's not storing any data? It is a web app that is capable of displaying data/files on other servers via the many listed protocols?

veidr 7y ago

Dropbox is still OK for easily sharing files with other, especially movies and stuff that its sharing web UI supports. But in 2019 it is basically an inferior and antiquated tool for syncing your own files. I moved to the open-source SyncThing[1] some years ago, which gave me: 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) 2.) the ability to actually sync folders that contain symlinks, as many types of software projects do (Dropbox and many other purported sync tools can't do that, which means there are many common types of folder that they can'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't sync a folder containing a symlink, but this may no longer be true. (?) 3.) better sync reliability 4.) better sync performance 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) The tradeoffs are: a.) a little bit more work to set up (but it's really just a little 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) b.) weaker story on mobile, no iOS app c.) no "cloud" so you have to do your own (e.g., leave an iMac running 24/7 back at your house or something) All in all, after 2+ years I am extremely happy with Syncthing, and I don'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. 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.) [1] https://syncthing.net https://syncthing.net (if on a Mac just install the Mac app and it will install the other components for you)

kranner 7y ago
> c.) no "cloud" so you have to do your own (e.g., leave an iMac running 24/7 back at your house or something) > That problem has now been solved better, way more securely, and for free. You haven't accounted for the cost and maintenance of the 24/7 iMac (or VPS) if one doesn't already have that, and not everyone does. I'm also a happy SyncThing user but I wouldn't say it's as easy to use as Dropbox for the general user.

telesilla 7y ago

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? I'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.

OJFord 7y ago
Syncthing is great. It's peer to peer, so peers only sync if another peer is also online; some people 'solve' that by having an always on server as a peer, but it's not a requirement. If you do have a server peer though, you can also use it to ensure that there's a second copy of all synchronised folders (other peers can safely have different subsets), and thus as the one place from which you can take snapshots to backup elsewhere. (Syncthing does have versioning a la Dropbox, but IMO just like Dropbox it's more about sharing between people/devices, and an automated regular snapshot should also be taken.)
jay_kyburz 7y ago
I wonder if there is a business there for some startup to host the always on part for SyncThing users.
- erichocean 7y ago
  Yes.
zackkatz 7y ago
https://www.arqbackup.com/ https://www.arqbackup.com/ Works with a bunch of providers and is really solid.

telesilla 7y ago

duckerude 7y ago
You don't need a server for Syncthing. Devices synchronize when they're both connected. It's decentralized. But Syncthing doesn't let you share a link to a file. For that there might be OwnCloud-based solutions.
yosamino 7y ago
It doesn't really require an always-on-system. That depends a little bit on what you use it for. For example I use it to synchronize the photos from my phone to my Laptop, whenever they can reach it other either by being on the same network or by connecting to the global syncthing "introducer" system, they start syncing. Having a "cloud" system becomes useful if you need to share a file with someone who's not online with you at the same time, which is a pretty big use-case I supposed. But that is a problem that any alternative that is software only will need to solve via some service. Nextcloud for example or also Seafile. Both have nice clients, but require some sort of server, whereas with syncthing the cloud part is optional.
vegetablepotpie 7y ago
I use ownCloud to sync files between my Windows and Linux computers. It’s pretty seamless and it’s a tool I’ve largely forgotten about and taken for granted. It does not meet your requirement of avoiding an always on system though, I run it on a home server.
veidr 7y ago
Yes, basically any $5/month VPS works great for Syncthing. The only thing I still do use Dropbox for is the share-with-whoever functionality, too. I'd be curious to hear about alternatives for that as well. (To me it seems pretty orthogonal to syncing folders across machines, though, and I'm fine with and probably prefer using different tools for that. Which I guess I am doing, since I use Syncthing for syncing and Dropbox for sharing.)

nullify88 7y ago

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

climb_stealth 7y ago
You could use them the other way around. Leave the dotfiles in your dropbox folder and symlink to them from your home directory. I keep my dotfiles in a private git repo that way.

TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago

Couldn't Dropbox have let you choose the behaviour you want? :/

vortico 7y ago

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?

nightfly 7y ago
https://github.com/axkibe/lsyncd https://github.com/axkibe/lsyncd

kbumsik 7y ago

What I don't understand about Dropbox in 2019 is that they are trying to limit features known to work without any issues. What's worse is that they do this with no particular reasons or explanations. Why they are doing this recently?

nashashmi 7y ago
Could they be adding feature of synchronizing multiple folder paths? Or could they be changing the use case of the platform to sharing files instead of backing them up.
criddell 7y ago
If they can't explain how the change is an improvement or fix for some problem, then it probably isn't being done for the benefit of the customer.
usaar333 7y ago
Dropbox never before supported symlinks as symlinks. (It would sync the target folder even if the target was in Dropbox, duplicating data). Now symlinks are understood by the server, but ones targeting content outside Dropbox break.

codetrotter 7y ago

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. But the solution is simple, just switch around which is the real file and which is the symlink. So where you used to have symlinks like ~/Dropbox/.bashrc -> ~/.bashrc ~/Dropbox/.vim —> ~/.vim/ and so on, remove the old symlinks and place the real files in ~/Dropbox/ and then symlink the other locations there. ~/.bashrc -> ~/Dropbox/.bashrc ~/.vim -> ~/Dropbox/.vim/ and so on. This is similar to what I do with some of my files in ~/bin/ Many of the files I have in my ~/bin/ are symlinks to files that live in git repositories. For example, I have a few “alias commands” (shell scripts that wrap a longer command) in ~/bin/ ~/bin/st -> ../src/github.com/ctsrc/shell-command-aliases/bin/st (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.)

Erlich_Bachman 7y ago
This is not a "solution", this is at best a workaround. Moving around important system files and replacing them with symlinks means you are changing your system and everything in it just because one small program that doesn't want to play by the rules can do what it wants. The real solution is to use other software than Dropbox, that plays by the rules and cares about its users.
- Nevermindmine 7y ago
  Why solution in quotes?
- amelius 7y ago
  Perhaps a better solution is to use cron to rsync the system files to somewhere in your Dropbox tree. That at least gives you a one-way backup of these files. And you probably don't want to write these files in the other direction.
  - 7y ago

sebst 7y ago

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

GordonS 7y ago
This is also one of the top voted feature requests on the UserVoice site for OneDrive - it's sat there for years with no action. I don't get why they wouldn't want to have this, given it would reduce the amount of data they have to store.
- ledauphin 7y ago
  probably because they ultimately make their money off people who go over the free storage limit. storage hardware is incredibly cheap, relatively speaking, so for Dropbox the main thing is not reducing costs, it's convincing people to pay in the first place.

Legogris 7y ago

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

krsdcbl 7y ago

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

delinka 7y ago

My intuition says that Dropbox should never have followed (soft) links outside the 'boundaries' of the sync folder. It never occurred to me to expect it to work like that. 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.)

nashashmi 7y ago
Symlinks are a terrific way to duplicate the presence of files in multiple places. When Dropbox allowed Symlinks, and recommended Symlinks, it fundamentally changed the meaning of what Symlinks were. It focused it on its technique to emulate and a way to direct Dropbox to synchronize folders not necessarily in the Dropbox folder.
Spivak 7y ago
I think the ‘correct’ behavior for Dropbox is to just back up the symlink. It should be treated like it was any other file. Because now I can’t have a symlink in my Dropbox pointing to a machine-specific file outside the folder (like an env-vars file that’s different between MacOS and Linux)

m1sta_ 7y ago

Why not just make this configurable?

josteink 7y ago

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

Hamuko 7y ago
I've been intending to setup my own after Dropbox emailed me about exceeding my device limit. Surely I'll get to it one day.

mkorfmann 7y ago

sensible change

hprotagonist 7y ago

well, fuck. The only reason i have dropbox on my workstation is so that i can ln -s /media/user/ssd_drive/results/bigstupidfile.tar.gz ~/Dropbox/user/ and then share that link.

kccqzy 7y ago

This is one of the most important reasons I'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't think I have any reason to use Dropbox any more.

beambot 7y ago
Didn't they already drop most Linux support?
- JamesCoyne 7y ago
  They announced they were dropping support for several less common filesystems used by Linux, then they decided that was a bad move and recanted. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20498454 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20498454
  - josteink 7y ago
    > several less common filesystems Better make that all the popular non-ext4 filesystems, 2 of which are default filesystems on the 2 major Linux-distributions out there (Red hat & Ubuntu). What on earth were they thinking?
    - beambot 7y ago
      Including sane defaults, like encryped home directories using encryptfs on ext4.
      - fencepost 7y ago
        Did they have to do hoop jumping with potential security ramifications to support those? Is Dropbox on Linux running entirely within the user account or is there a system level component of it with communication to a user level component? If the latter, I could see potential areas that could at least be probed for potential vulnerabilities.

MobileVet 7y ago

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. 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.

TheUndead96 7y ago

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

donatj 7y ago

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. They were amazing software and now they’ve eroded away most of it such that they have very little over their competitors. 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.

Razengan 7y ago
> * 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.* iCloud Drive does that too, and should be good enough if you stay within the Apple ecosystem, can’t say about support/reliability on other platforms.
- donatj 7y ago
  > if you stay within the Apple ecosystem That’s the rub really. All my machines other than my main Laptop run Linux and my phone is Android. I’ve really set myself up for pain.
  - dddw 7y ago
    nono the companies who built the silos they want you to be in, they set you up for the pain deliberately
nabla9 7y ago
Most likely because they focus on different type of customers and trying to grow.

tyingq 7y ago

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

Syzygies 7y ago

Finally! A symlink is a file like any other. You don't want sync software going off and "thinking" about what a symlink really means, anymore than you'd want sync software going off and "thinking" after finding porn on your computer. It is a user's responsibility to insure that a symlink is useful across sync'd computers, or to ignore the symlink. A good test case is a MacOS Application Package. These often have internal symlinks that most users never notice, e.g. from "current" 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 "thinking" about the symlink rather than treating it like any other file. There'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 "atomic" directory, so that one doesn't for example hose a git archive modified at both ends, or a sparse disk image modified at both ends. 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.

dreamcompiler 7y ago

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 inside 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.

eslaught 7y ago
It used to be that if you created a symlink (even an internal symlink) it would result in storing a duplicate of the symlink target instead of the symlink itself. On the first machine, it would preserve the symlink, but on any subsequent machines it would store a copy of the file. You could restore the symlink by hand on other machines, and it wouldn't interfere with syncing, but you had to do it manually. With the old Dropbox, if you did the following: 1. machine A: clone a git repo that contains a symlink 2. machine B: wait for repo to sync 3. machine B: git status You'd see a "type change" in the git status output. If you did git checkout you'd get your symlink back and it wouldn't interfere with machine A. Which was all fine if you had your file contents synced in git or similar, but if you had it set up by hand it was a huge pain in the rear (because you'd have to locate the bad symlinks and restore by hand manually).

fiendsan 7y ago

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

Spooky23 7y ago

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

mikorym 7y ago

I didn't use Dropbox in this way (and I realise actually I should use symlinks more) but why would they change this behaviour?

pier25 7y ago

For us techies this can be a big deal, but the vast majority of users do not even know what symlink is. Personally I'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.

fencepost 7y ago

If it's all on the same filesystem/partition you could use hard links instead, including on Windows (NTFS only though, and based on reading just now I'd forgotten that it's files-only). 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.

bsg75 7y ago

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't have to worry about how it interprets filesystems across the OSes it supports. Being able to backup my home directory in its entirety and sync a subset of it (ex code projects) between machines is handy.

dbg31415 7y ago

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