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Do you have a philosophical objection to using symlinks? As of the last time I checked, you also need a symlink for Google drive.

• mayneack 14y ago
  That's what I use on ubuntu 12.04 and it is great. Only problem is that if your directories overlap inside dropbox, they count twice. I'm rarely above 50gb though, so doubling a random directory (like linking my camera uploads to photos) is never a problem.
• meritt 14y ago
  I personally don't have a problem using symlinks but it's a user-experience thing. I know plenty of less-savvy friends and family who have a need to backup and/or share things -- Let's say a 'Photos' directory or maybe a 'Taxes' directory. Telling those people they must relocate their directories inside 'Dropbox' is confusing and, depending on the source files, can often break things (in the event of application files that has a particular requirement for the directory structure) Trying to tell those same users how to create a symlink is unrealistic and should not be necessary for a user-friendly backup & sharing platform. I didn't want to name drop other competitors because that wasn't the intent of my post, but as you brought it up, I'm talking about more user-friendly competition such as Mozy, Carbonite or SugarSync.
  • samspot 14y ago
    Thanks for clarifying. I agree with you on the usability issues, but would have expected you to say "won't recommend" instead of "won't use". I have noticed a surprising number of non-technical (70-year old couple at church) people using dropbox, but that could be due to access to technical friends and family (their 25 year old programmer son).