After my laptop got a (non fatal) soaking due to a burst pipe, I have been looking at additional measures to backup some of my data1.

Remembering a post by but she’s a girl, I duly downloaded and installed myself a copy of Dropbox. BSAG mentioned creating symlinks for folders rather than copying so that is what I tried since I didn’t really want to be dragging and moving things too much.

After creating a symlink/ alias with crtl+click, I dragged it to the dropbox folder where it was duly synced. The contents of the aliased folder however, were not. A few repeat & fails later a bit more searching brought me to this post that stated that this only works if you symlink out from the Dropbox directory.

So, as far as I can tell there are no GUI methods for this so it was off to Terminal for me:

Last login: Mon Dec 14 22:50:49 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
Ians-MacBook:~ ian$
Ians-MacBook:~ ian$ cd dropbox
Ians-MacBook:~/dropbox ian$ ln -s ~/WordPress/New\ Blog\ Backups "New Blog Backups"

That creates the symbolic link (ln -s) from the backup folder (~/WordPress/New\ Blog\ Backups) to the Dropbox-synced folder ("New Blog Backups").

Now whenever I backup my site via ftp & drop it into the normal folder, a copy gets pushed up to the remote server as well.

Since I only have one laptop at the moment, between-system syncing is not needed (though I am looking at either the MSI Wind or Lenovo S10 as a ultra-portable2).

Hopefully this system will serve me well & transparently to keep important documents safe from burst pipes.

  1. Unfortunately the PSU for the backup drive also got a soaking and is currently dead too. ↑
  2. These seem to be the best bet to persuade OS X onto ↑

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