gdgt

Earlier today, I decided to upgrade my Dropbox account and move my entire home directory into it so I had a real time back up of all my files and folders. I simply went into my home directory and cut (not copied) all of my folders out of it and pasted them into the Dropbox folder I had in my drives root directory, but when I went back to my home directory to check that I hadn't missed anything, I saw that some of the folders hadn't moved. These were "My Music", "My Pictures", "Desktop", basically the default folders created by Windows upon installation.

The thing is though, the blue sync symbol Dropbox applies to any object that is is currently synchronising was present on these folders and I realised that it had in fact copied those folders to the Dropbox folder and created a link to those in my home directory so there was an additional stage of synchronisation taking place. Pretty good if you have programs like iTunes which rely on having these folders in your home directory.

I have however been unable to reproduce this every time, with the folders sometimes linking and syncing, and sometimes they are simply copied out of the home directory. Has anyone else noticed this and if so, do you know what is going on here?

Thanks in advance.

A better way would to right click on the My Documents folder and go into its properties, then change its target location to that of your Dropbox (as long as the dropbox isn't inside your MyDocuments, which you can change in its options). That way Windows properly moves the folder structure and everything should keep working without any duplication.

Dropbox is also working on syncing files that arn't in the DropBox folder. So if you are want to sync your Users folder, you just rightclick it and press "Add to DropBox" or similar.

This feature isn't out yet, but it will be in the not so far future.
Another feature that is incomming is the possibility to choose what computers to synchronize what with, so for instance, you want backup of your user folder, and that might get large. If you connect dropbox to another computer, it will download your user folder to this computer as well.
That is something the DropBox teams is working to change, so that you can choose to only synchronize your user folder with the web, and not with the other devices connected to your dropbox account.