To answer your question: what I do and what I recommend others do unless there is some mitigating situation not allowing this, is to treat your Dropbox folder as a "master database," which is quasi-accurate description of it as it is a representation of what Dropbox stores in the cloud. It'd almost be irresponsible to build a gui into OSX itself for symlinking simply because a lot of people would end up with a disaster of broken symlinks. Obviously, Apple needs to cater to its widest audience, hence it's all about the Alias. With symlinks, the file paths are absolute, meaning if you move the original file, you'll break the symlink, which is bad in contrast, you can move the original file associated with an Alias as much as you want and the system keeps track of its location so when you use the Alias, it will behave as expected. by Apple's design I would imagine, because it can easily break if you're not familiar with how symlinks work. ![]() ) The average OS X user isn't aware of this functionality. With symbolic links in place, you can save files where you normally would, and they'll still automatically sync to the cloud. Note that foldername has no trailing slash ( /), but that Files/ bit does - this is very important! You can also drag the source and destination folders into the Terminal window instead of typing the paths. Ln -s /Users/username/Documents/foldername /Users/path/to/dropbox/Files/ Since Dropbox allows you to choose where your Dropbox folder resides, there's no "one size fits all" solution, but here's the general syntax (replace username, foldername, and path/to/dropbox with your own values): To do this, you need to use the Terminal. Using this method, the file would be available in both places, without taking up any extra disk space. I found that I could keep a copy in the place where I usually would and sync with the cloud by creating symbolic links to the folders that I want to sync inside the Dropbox folder. ![]() I have my own folder/file organization for projects, which I would prefer to maintain. Although Dropbox is great, it keeps the files that it syncs to the cloud in a Dropbox folder. I use Dropbox to keep files in sync between my work computer (a PC), my MacBook Pro, and an iMac at home.
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February 2023
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