10-03-2012, 06:14 PM
TheTominator wrote:
What if you used soft links instead of aliases?
If the Dropbox folder is on the same drive (and the "files" you want to share are actual files and not folders) you can use hard links instead of soft links. That would definitely work.
What are "soft links"?
Robert M wrote:
MAvic,
I'm sorry I didn't ask you to describe how you've organized your storage. IF you had listed what you said in this post, I would've immediately said Dropbox isn't a workable solution. At least not with your current workflow.
It's still feasible to use Dropbox but you'd have to modify your work flow to do it. Maybe keep it as you've described except for one change. Use Dropbox for current projects only and leave everything else in your existing folder. Here's a simple configuration:
Create a folder within your Dropbox folder and call it Current Projects. Within that folder, have a subfolder for a given client's project. When you're done with the project, move it to your primary projects folder and sort it accordingly.
That way, Dropbox is autosyncing just the current projects. This backs them up in more than one location, too.
Robert
"Current Projects" is tough to define. I have Projects folder with all my projects, unless I haven't heard from the client for a few years, they've closed down, been acquired... basically if I think I won't hear from them again, I put them in an Archived Projects directory.
I basically have one client that I want to have easy access to their files for the current year. There's ~12 years worth of files in the directory, sorted by year. That said, there's also other folders like a "logos" one that I keep all logos in related to them as they get reused between the years.
If I move the location of those files:
- All of the links in the files (eg linked photos for INDD files) will break
- My backup won't sync anymore. I can setup another, but that just complicates things
- Each year I would have to move the previous year's directory back to the other location. That will likely end up with multiple versions backed up, hogging a bunch more storage space.
- The versioning of my files - both on the server and on the remote backup - will likely be messed up
Another thing that's VERY alarming to me with dropbox is that when I stop sharing files, it delete the local copies. That cannot ever happen! I don't want some glitch in the dropbox app or server wiping out my local files. Any idea if there's a way to tell it to stop sharing something, but not actually delete the files? Same with deleting files out of dropbox - I want them to stay local.
For example, I used the phone photo upload thing to get some more free storage. Then I deleted those files using the web GUI. It also deleted the files on my harddrive. That should never, ever, ever happen.