Dropbox no longer follows symlinks to items outside of your Dropbox account

Re:Dropbox no longer follows symlinks to items outside of yo... by lioeters on Saturday August 31, 2019 @09:59AM (#20846292)

Very much in agreement with your comment.

Having system files in Dropbox as the source of truth, and symlinking to their canonical locations, is a poor workaround. Does the software work for you, or do you work for the software?

As another comment suggested, one can use cron and rsync to the Dropbox folder. This at least maintains the priority of the system files being where they should be.

Or, one can use any other software that respects and works for the user. Syncthing is great.

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Re:Dropbox no longer follows symlinks to items outside of yo... by theaino on Saturday August 31, 2019 @10:05AM (#20846321)

Dropbox’s following of symlinks has always been magical, nonstandard behavior that breaks symlinks and is user-hostile for anyone who relies on proper symlink behavior.

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Re:Dropbox no longer follows symlinks to items outside of yo... by michaelmrose on Saturday August 31, 2019 @01:26PM (#20847603)

I'm not saying your wrong but I don't quite understand your answer can you please expand on that?

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Re:Dropbox no longer follows symlinks to items outside of yo... by Veen on Saturday August 31, 2019 @04:12PM (#20848544)

Dropbox didn’t sync the symlinks; it synced the files that were being linked to, which is not what happens with most unix tools.

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Re:Dropbox no longer follows symlinks to items outside of yo... by jimmaswell on Saturday August 31, 2019 @10:52AM (#20846609)

Dropbox as a source of truth is the pattern I was already using because it makes more sense to me. Not sure what the point of the change was though.

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