Symlinking all my data folders to my Dropbox sub-folders

Question

My desktop's hard-drive got corrupted, so I bought a DropBox a/c to work on all my files sync'ed online.

Example : I've copied all files in ~/www to ~/Dropbox/www and then symlinked it to my DropBox a/c. (ln -s ~/Dropbox/www www) So my localhost/username points to ~/Dropbox/www I'm doing this to all my folders - vhosts, Documents etc. I'm also doing this to my mysql databases - symlinking the /var/lib/mysql to ~/Dropbox/mysql

Will this slow down my PC ? Performance ? With Dropbox indexing the files every now and then ?

Answer 1

As long as you really don't have "live" databases and www services actually running on that box and changing files frequently in these directories, you should be fine. Otherwise, Dropbox will be opening an io read stream beside whatever streams your other www or db services are currently using every time a file gets added or changed in these directories which could potentially cause file lock issues and hinder the performance of your application processing wise and network-wise.