Trouble getting dropbox to work...

[M A V I C]

I've got a lot of files. Way more than I'd want to put in dropbox. I have dropbox installed, and it has a local folder it syncs. I put aliases in there for the folders I want to have in dropbox. That's what https://www.dropbox.com/help/12/en says to do.

But I noticed not that may files uploaded, and when I checked the web interface they're all just generic looking file icons and show up as files rather than folders.

How can I share just a select group of files (a few hundred of them) without moving them?

Thanks

[ztirffritz]

I don't think that using Aliases will work. You need the actual files. Just my take on how it works.

[macbeergeek2]

The way you're doing it now, it's only syncing the aliases that you put in the Dropbox folder, not the actual files. Re-read the link you included. It says that you have move you folder of files into the Dropbox folder, and then create aliases to that folder in order to access it from other locations (on your Mac).

[M A V I C]

Oy. That completely defeats the reason I'm using dropbox then. Thanks.

[clay]

look into the "selective sync" feature in dropbox. May help you get around the issue you're dealing with.

[NewtonMP2100]

....stop....DROP....and roll....???

[M A V I C]

clay wrote:
look into the "selective sync" feature in dropbox. May help you get around the issue you're dealing with.

I would still have to move the files, or deselect a ton of stuff. Not only that, but each time I had more things, I would have to deselect those.

[clay]

you are correct, but just thought I'd point out the feature in case it helped at all.

[macbeergeek2]

If this helps at all, you can change the default location that Dropbox keeps it's folder at, even on another hard drive.

[M A V I C]

Yeah, I already changed the default location. My main file structure works like this:

Projects > Client > Year

What I want to share out are select client year folders. If I shared out Projects as the main dropbox folder, then I would have to deselect many dozens of folders, and remember to do this each time. Plus a given client could have a TB+ of data, but I only want to share out the current year which is nested within that folder.

The entire projects directory is backed up to a server, which is then backed up offsite. If I pull data out of there, it gets removed from my backup.

The whole reason for doing this is so that I don't have to duplicate data that I have to manage. So if I have to manually copy it to dropbox, I might as well just manually copy it to my server.