I have drop-box installed successfully on my machine, however, things I want to share I have to copy into it. Large files. If I some well organised directories in my documents, do I really have to drag them into dropbox?
Can instead make an alias of the files and paste these aliases into my dropbox folder to share them without moving them?
Any risks involved here? Will the other person wipe them from my system?
1 Answer
To add files to your dropbox that are located outside your dropbox folder you can create a hardlink to the file. This creates a link in the filesystem table such that the file appears to be in two places at once, so editing either the file from your dropbox folder or from the original location will change the same file.
Also when you create a hardlink instead of a symlink the file will remain on your drive as long as there is at least one reference to the file. So if someone else deletes the file from the dropbox your local copy outside the dropbox folder remains.
Creating a hardlink is simplest from the commandline, open a terminal and enter ln <target file> <link name>. So if you have a file ~/important.txt and want it to be in your dropbox under a folder shared_folder the complete command is ln ~/important.txt ~/Dropbox/shared_folder/important.txt.
