To keep multiple computers synced with dropbox I tried the following.
Approach A.
-Computer 1: Install dropbox, dropbox folder: /Dropbox/
-Computer 1: Create symbolic link in that folder to home folder
$ln -s /home/ /Dropbox/
-Computer 2: Install dropbox, dropbox folder: /Dropbox/ (got populated with files from computer 1
-Computer 2: Try to overwrite the files with symbolic links to identical local files
$ln -sfn /home/ /Dropbox/
ln: `/Dropbox/home': cannot overwrite directory
So that approach fails, does anyone have a suggestion to fix the error?
Or another approach? The approaches I have come up so far:
Approach B. I could write a script to recursively symlink all the files but I would rather not go that direction since then I would have to run that script in order to pickup on new files.
Approach C. Use rsync to sync between the home and dropbox folder. I would not like that since then it is not automatically updated, you would have to call rsync to do that. And putting rsync in a cronjob that runs each minute seems not like a ideal solution.
Can someone help me with fixing approach A or coming up with approach D or convincing me of approach B or C ?
Best Answer
Is there really no possible way to specify which directory you want Dropbox to operate on? You can't just tell Dropbox to use /home?
If not, you could try skipping symlinks entirely and use several bind mounts to accomplish this. In other words:
on both computers.