Dropbox sync with whole mac

taylorconor95

I know this may sound a bit over the top but there has to be a way. I am a developer and I upload all of my projects and stuff to Dropbox incase of inevitable computer failure. I was sick of drag/dropping files to dropbox, so I rm rf'd my documents folder and replaced it with an alias to a folder in Dropbox.

However my mac does'n like this very much, and for example when I did this with my pictures folder, I could no longer open Photo Booth because it 'couldn't find' my pictures folder, even though there was an alias present.

Is there a better way to fully integrate all / most of my mac with dropbox without using these messy aliases?

Many thanks

Sad Professor

Sounds like a recipe for disaster tbh. What's wrong with using Time Machine?

Colonel Panic

Most apps don't understand aliases. They just see them as a file. Symlinks are the way to go.

I probably would've left the Documents folder intact and put a symlink to it in the Dropbox folder.

Furthermore, do you use source control for your stuff? How about pushing it to Github or Bitbucket?

taylorconor95

Colonel Panic wrote: »

use source control for your stuff? How about pushing it to Github or Bitbucket?

You mean like repositories and stuff? I have some set up on my own server to store code between anybody working on a project, but I work off my local project files

Ill have a look into those symlink things though never came across them, thanks.

conor.hogan.2

Sounds like you mainly want to use something like Picassa for photos and Github/whatever/whoever for your code instead of lashing everything into dropbox.

Having a public repo (github etc) with examples of your code will help later too.

I use alias out of my dropbox, as in store folders in the dropbox folder but alias out to another location.

taylorconor95

conor.hogan.2 wrote: »

I use alias out of my dropbox, as in store folders in the dropbox folder but alias out to another location.

Yeah thats what I had been doing but it was getting ugly as I sead in the original post.

I set up those symlinks this morning (ln -s if i'm correct?) and its pretty awesome! The original files are stored locally, and the symlinks in my dropbox folder. So far its working well we'll see how long it takes for me to trust it. For now, hourly TM backups!

conor.hogan.2

taylorconor95 wrote: »

For now, hourly TM backups!

I would still recommend using an online code repository and picasa for photos and youtube/whatever for video along with Dropbox and a local external copy too.

Liameter

I noticed with Dropbox that, if you delete files from a Dropbox folder, they remain on the dropbox.com server for several days or even weeks. This means that you can go to that web site, log in, and "undelete" the files.