How to Use Dropbox to Back Up a Folder Outside Dropbox Directory on Windows

dropboxwindows xp

On Mac OS X, I create a symbolic link to the folder I'm trying to back up, and put it in the Dropbox folder (e.g. /Users/zachary/Dropbox/DocumentsBackup —> /Users/zachary/Documents) and that solves my problem.

No idea how to do it on Windows XP, though.

Best Answer

The equivalent of a symbolic link on Windows is the junction point. You can create junctions with the appropriately-named utility Junction from Mark Russinovich at Microsoft.

junction.exe C:\Users\Zachary\Dropbox\Documents C:\Users\Zachary\Documents

On Windows Vista and later, there also exists the command line utility mklink.

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Make a backup of the directories you symlinked. Once that is done, delete the directories, and the symlink should be removed.

So lets make this an example:

Backup C:\Users\Simon\Video

Then once its been backed up, delete the folder. Use command prompt for this.

Cd to the folder, ex:

$ cd C:\Users\Simon

then

$ rmdir Videos

Restore the folder once its done. This should stop it.

Mac – How to set up multiple users on the same computer using the same DropBox folder

Give both users the same permissions for the folder using chmod

If you want to give permissions to all users to read, write, execute put in sudo chmod -R a+rwx [folder name] in the Terminal.

UPDATE:

The above command only does it for the directory as it is, any new files/directories created will not inherit the permissions.

Put in chmod -R g+s [folder name] and this will set the permissions recursively and any future files and folders will have the correct permissions.

Run both commands to achieve sharing between the users of the DropBox folder.

Best Answer

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