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/

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.