How To Sync Files & Folders Which Are Outside My Dropbox Folder
Dropbox is an excellent service to sync and back up your files online. It can sync your files across different computers as well as your phone. It is quite efficient and fast at what it does, however, there is limitation to the files or folders you can sync across computers, with Dropbox.
Dropbox only syncs files which are inside the “My Dropbox” Folder. If you need to sync files that are located on a different drive or folder, you need to create a copy of the folder inside Dropbox Folder. This would not only create multiple copies of the same files and waste hard drive space, but you would need to manually copy paste any new files created in the original folder.
Lets see how we can sync any external files and folders to Dropbox with ease.
Sync External Folders With Dropbox Folder Sync:
Dropbox Folder Sync is a simple utility which gives you the ability to sync any file or folder to your Dropbox account, without the need to place those files inside the Dropbox folder.
After install you would be asked to set the location of your “My Dropbox” folder. Just browse to your My Dropbox folder and select it.
You can click on “Sync A Folder” button to select any folder which you would like to sync with your Dropbox account.
This utility also adds an option to the right-click context menu, which lets you sync any external folder with Dropbox.
How Does This Program Work?
It moves the original folder to Dropbox and creates a symbolic link for the folder using the junction utility (installs automatically with the setup) from Sysinternals. Thus you can get access to the same folder from two locations.
The folders aren’t created twice and you can access your folders at the original location.
Yup, Its that easy, and you thought this was going to another big How-To post. There is nothing to it. Download and install this nifty little utility and sync away.
Dropbox Folder Sync Features:
- Lets you sync any folder outside Dropbox using a simple GUI or just Right Click any folder and Select “Sync With Dropbox”.
- Asks for a confirmation to overwrite if the folder already exists in Dropbox.
Couple of things to remember:
- This method which uses symlink ONLY works on NTFS partitions.
- The symlink might not appear immediately because if you are moving a huge folder say some gigabytes, symlink will be created only after the folder has completely moved into the Dropbox folder.
