My Documents – Henry Poon's Blog https://blog.henrypoon.com Wed, 05 Oct 2022 01:53:09 +0000 en-US hourly 1 83044199 New Sync Method https://blog.henrypoon.com/blog/2010/05/21/new-sync-method/ https://blog.henrypoon.com/blog/2010/05/21/new-sync-method/#respond Sat, 22 May 2010 04:05:15 +0000 http://henrypoon.mooo.com/blog/new-sync-method Apparently, my initial set up for syncing my files using symlinks was a little bit reversed.  Rather than setting the symlink to be in the Dropbox folder, I’ve now put my originals in the Dropbox folder and have now put the symlinks at where those files used to be.  The reason I did this was that my initial setup confused Dropbox.  It would only sync my files at program launch.  While the program was running it did not know how to follow the symlink to do the automatic syncing.

However, this poses a problem for syncing the desktop folder.  I wasn’t going to move everything on my desktop to the dropbox folder because that would mean I wouldn’t be able to see these files on the desktop anymore.  Also, if I did put a symlink in my user folder, network shares would be broken since other computers cant follow symlinks when using network access.  I couldn’t go back to putting a symlink in the Dropbox directory due to the problem that I just had.  So what I did was use LiveMesh.  LiveMesh has the ability to follow symlinks while the program is running.  Now I put up a symlink for my Desktop in my Documents folder and now the program just syncs that.  For some reason, LiveMesh can’t sync the Desktop folder directly.

I might just ditch Dropbox altogether so I can do all my file syncing using LiveMesh.

]]> https://blog.henrypoon.com/blog/2010/05/21/new-sync-method/feed/ 0 347 Helloooo Symlinks https://blog.henrypoon.com/blog/2010/05/18/helloooo-symlinks/ https://blog.henrypoon.com/blog/2010/05/18/helloooo-symlinks/#respond Tue, 18 May 2010 08:58:30 +0000 http://henrypoon.mooo.com/blog/helloooo-symlinks So apparently Dropbox doesn’t let me share any random folder on my computer.  I can only share folders that are WITHIN the “My Dropbox” directory in my documents.  My aim was to share my “users/desktop” directory.  The only way I could do that is if my Dropbox folder was somehow one level higher than my desktop folder.  Doing that would be disastrous seeing that it would share everything else in the same directory level.  I tried using Live Mesh, but it refuses to share my desktop.

However, I stumbled upon something called symbolic links (symlinks for short).  Basically it is a pointer to another directory.  I put a symlink in my Dropbox folder which pointed to my desktop and now inside my Dropbox folder there is a folder called “Desktop”.  Well, it’s not exactly a folder.  It’s a symbolic link.  When the computer follows the link when I double click it, it just leads to the destination directory that I set.  So now Dropbox has no problem syncing that directory!

EDIT May 21, 2010: Apparently Dropbox can’t actually follow the symlinks inside the Dropbox directory while its running.  The originals have to be inside the Dropbox folder and the symlink has to be put at where you used to access those files before.  At the same time, shortcuts can be used in place of symlinks.

More info about symlinks here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_link

]]> https://blog.henrypoon.com/blog/2010/05/18/helloooo-symlinks/feed/ 0 340