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You are right: Dropbox's behavior with regard to symlinks is fundamentally wrong. It is kinda lame that other services, e.g. Google Drive, just skip symlinks,
by veidr 14y ago
You are right: Dropbox's behavior with regard to symlinks is fundamentally wrong.
It is kinda lame that other services, e.g. Google Drive, just skip symlinks, but that isn't as dangerous. The hierarchical structure of a directory tree is often effectively part of an application's data, and Dropbox silently corrupts that data. This can cause crashes, or multiple conflicting copies of not-easily-merged data to be strewn about in different places.
It's also hard to initially notice how broken it is, since symlinks work on the first machine where Dropbox encounters them, but then on all subsequent client devices that Dropbox sees are replaced with some version of whatever data they point to.
- nessus42 14y ago> You are right: Dropbox's behavior with regard to symlinks is fundamentally wrong. What's even worse, is that no matter how hard I try, I am not able to convince most people of how wrong this is--even those who claim to be and should be computer savy. E.g., on support forums for other sync services, users are typically clamoring for Dropbox-style syncing of symlinks, and they will not be convinced otherwise, in spite of all reason. And despite 30 years of hard-earned experience with symlinks that irrefutably demonstrates that transparent syncing of symlinks is nothing but badness. But thank goodness that BitTorrent got it right!
- davidjade 14y agoYeah but the real problem, the ones users are trying to solve is the limits on having to move everything into one sync folder. Transparent symlinks are the cheap fix for them so that they can keep their files where they want and still have them sync. The better solution would be to just allow any folder(s) to be synced but none of the major cloud sync providers seem to want to enable that.
- aroemers 14y agoHave a look at https://www.cubby.com/ https://www.cubby.com/. It syncs existing folders you want to, and per synced folder you can decide to use their cloud or sync directly.
- veidr 14y agoCubby apparently also completely broken when it comes to symbolic links. http://help.cubby.com/forums/169907-general/suggestions/3529481-syncing-of-symbolic-links-and-packages-in-osx http://help.cubby.com/forums/169907-general/suggestions/3529...
- nessus42 14y ago> The better solution would be to just allow any folder(s) to be synced but none of the major cloud sync providers seem to want to enable that. This correct solution is precisely what BitTorrent Sync provides. So that's all the more reason to be thankful that a seemingly excellent sync solution has finally arrived.