One of my favorite free OSX apps is Dropbox (which also available for PCs and Linux). Dropbox is kind of an on-line backup solution that constantly uploads your files to an online account and then synchronizes the file with any other computer you have set up. This means if, say, you put a file in your dropbox folder within moments (depending on its size and the speed of your connection) it’s uploaded to your online storage and copied to any computers that you have dropbox installed on.

This is all great and fun and all, but where it really shines is with soft links. Soft links are aliases to directories and files on your computer so that to the operating system they look like they are in two places but it’s really the same file. Dropbox forces you to put any files you want synchronized with your online account into the Dropbox folder in your profile. But using soft links you can link to directories and files elsewhere so that they are synchronized even if they aren’t in that folder.

Let’s say you’re working on a term paper and you keep all your term papers in your Documents directory in a sub-directory called “papers” (~/Documents/papers/). You could link to the papers directory from your Dropbox folder and then all your papers are backed up constantly. If you accidentally delete it, or if you want to go back in time and get yesterday’s version, Dropbox lets you. But it also means that if you have a laptop or another computer with Dropbox installed on it, you could create the same soft link so that the same directory (~/Documents/papers/) exists  on that computer. Now if you move from one computer ot the next your work is already there waiting for you.

You can even get creative and synchronize application data, so that all your preferences follow you, for example. I use a program called Journler to organize all my notes and to-do items. By soft linking the data directory into my Dropbox I can move to another computer (my laptop) and open Journler there and see what I was looking at on my Desktop machine. You could do this with your Downloads folder or even your iTunes library (if it’s not too big - Dropbox gives you 2GB of storage free, but more costs $$).

So, how do you create a soft link? I do it in the terminal like so:

cd ~/Dropbox
ln -s ~/Documents/papers

The above example would create a link to papers. That’s all there is to it.

Tags: software, sync

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 8th, 2009 at 9:44 pm and is filed under Awesome Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.