As of mid-2019, Dropbox no longer follows items outside of your Dropbox account that are linked to by a symlink.
You can have symlinks that link to items both in and outside of your Dropbox account; however, these two types of symlinks sync differently.
- If you create a symlink that links to an item in your Dropbox account, we’ll sync the the symlink file at its location and the item that it links to at its location respectively
- If you create a symlink that links to an item outside of your Dropbox account, when you sign in to dropbox.com you’ll only see the symlink file but not the content it links to
Too bad, as I had considered symlink support one of the advantages of Dropbox over iCloud Drive. It made it possible to store things in Dropbox yet have them actually reside at other locations in the file system. And I could use Git to manage the contents of a folder that syncs, without having to put the .git folder in Dropbox.
The timing of this is not clear to me, though. The article says “as of mid-2019,” which we have certainly passed. Yet, as of now, it seems to still be following symlinks, and the report it generated for me lists the symlinks that “will” stop syncing.
Dropbox Git iCloud Drive Mac macOS 10.15 Catalina
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