There are plenty of reasons to put things into the cloud, be it as a backup or to access them remotely from other devices. But putting things into the cloud can be a hassle — Apple's trying to make it a little more seamless with iCloud but if you're old school like me, that seamlessness just doesn't do it for you. There's something about having all my computer's files neatly organized and accessible that soothes my more obsessive tendencies. At the same time, I want to be able to access my important files while I'm on the go, and I want to know that they're backed up in case catastrophe strikes.
That's where the cloud really comes in. I've got a local running (two, actually) and I use, and though I can use Backblaze to access files from my iPhone, it's just terribly slow. Enter Dropbox Dropbox, on the other hand, is blazing fast. Uploads and downloads sling through the web as fast as my connection can handle.
Note: The below tutorial assumes that you have already installed (and configured) your primary Dropbox account in your computer. The Linux tutorial is based on Ubuntu Lucid and the Mac tutorial is based on OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. The default folder for Dropbox is /home/Dropbox. Jun 23, 2015 - Screenshot Tips: On a Mac, press Command + shift + 3 to capture your. Just open your Dropbox preferences, select the Account tab, then.
I can open the and get to all the files in there with ease and speed. But there were two basic options for backing up my files to Dropbox: either copy them over regularly, or just move them onto Dropbox (oh, the humanity). Turns out, there's another way, one in which you can keep your folders and files right where they are and have them backed up and synced with Dropbox. It all works through the magic of symbolic links.
How does this work? You might be familiar with alias links on your Mac — it creates a shortcut that points to another file, open the shortcut and it opens that file. A symbolic link is similar, except that instead of creating a pointer it creates a redirect. Whatever you do with the symbolic link (or symlink) is applied to the linked file. Dropbox works by creating a folder on your computer that is synced with their servers. Place a file in that folder and it's synced to the cloud. Upload a file from a Dropbox app or their web interface and it'll be downloaded onto your computer.
Basically, that's it. Thing is, if you want to back up files to Dropbox, copying them into that folder means they're taking up space twice on your hard drive, and just moving them to Dropbox takes them right out of your organizational flow. Put a tiny symlink into Dropbox and it can back up an entire folder elsewhere on your computer If you were to create an alias to a file and put that in the Dropbox folder, only the alias would get backed up, and that's not terribly useful. But if you put a symlink into the Dropbox folder, when the Dropbox backup app looks at it it's redirected to the linked file, and it backs that up instead. So with one 25-byte symlink you can back up gigabytes upon gigabytes of data without duplicating it on your computer. The additional benefit is that you can sync and back up entire directories that would be otherwise difficult to move. You can put your Pictures folder into Dropbox with a symlink or your entire Documents folder.