Funny timing, just received this back from Dropbox support and it seems to have resolved my user's problem. Her issue similarly popped up when we migrated her to a new Mac and then changed her user account name.
Thanks for writing in. If you're having trouble running Dropbox on your Mac then please try these steps and then restart Dropbox.
1. Stop Dropbox (If needed):
- Click the Dropbox icon in the menu bar at the top of your screen
- Click on the gear icon in the Notifications panel and select 'Quit Dropbox'
2. Download the newest version: www.dropbox.com/install
3. Open your Terminal app (Located at /Applications/Utilities/Terminal)
4. Copy and paste the following lines into the Terminal, ONE AT A TIME, and press ENTER after each one. PLEASE make sure you copy and paste these commands (don't type them by hand), as getting them wrong could cause some harm. You'll be prompted for your computer's admin password (not your Dropbox password) after entering the first command. Keep in mind that the password field in the terminal will remain blank as you type your password. After you type it, just press ENTER.
sudo chown "$USER" "$HOME"
sudo chown -R "$USER" ~/Dropbox
sudo chmod -R u+rw ~/Dropbox
sudo mv ~/.dropbox ~/.Trash/dropbox.old
sudo mv ~/.dropbox-master ~/.Trash/dropbox-master.old
sudo chmod -N ~
sudo mv /Library/DropboxHelperTools ~/DropboxHelperTools.old
5. Open the .dmg file from step # 2 and double click the Dropbox icon to install Dropbox.
6. Restart Dropbox from the Applications folder.
Hopefully that does the trick for you as well!
I can't be sure but I suspect this may be due to Apple's autosave and versioning system.
So I found and tried this to disable it:
defaults write com.apple.iWork.Keynote ApplePersistence -bool no
defaults write com.apple.iWork.Pages ApplePersistence -bool no
defaults write com.apple.iWork.Numbers ApplePersistence -bool no
defaults write com.apple.TextEdit ApplePersistence -bool no
defaults write com.apple.Preview ApplePersistence -bool no
Then create then edit a new document multiple times, and it syncs fine.
There is metadata (extended attriutes?) or something (hardlinks?) on existing documents though, so they may need to be "saved as" under another name, and the original removed.
Initial results show that I don't have file sync issues anymore but I can't be quite sure if my fix is effective or I'm lucky, or an Apple update put things in order. Whatever, feedback would be helpful.
I opened a topic on Google Drive's support forum but with limited hope.
Best Answer
I sync some small local folders using Dropbox (Google Drive seems more reluctant to this sort of thing, I have no experience using OneDrive).
To do this,
ln -s /path/to/file /path/to/linkin Terminal works for me, no problem.Disclaimers
This solution is Mac (possibly *nix)-specific, see here.
This is not officially supported by Dropbox.
Your home directory contains lots of config files I would be wary of sending via network connection at all.
All the services you have listed have 'free' and 'premium' versions. I won't enumerate these here, but be aware of file and upload/bandwidth restrictions which will likely cause problems with this approach.