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Assume I have my general dropbox folder, and my Photo/Video files in an another folder:

/mnt/myhd/Dropbox
/mnt/myhd/MyPhotosVideos

Now, how can I upload all files from MyPhotosVideos to Dropbox without the need to copy/move them inside the Dropbox folder? If I copy them this takes (a lot of) extra space. If I move them I risk deleting the files by the Dropbox daemon due to an (human) error.

Can I solve this with hard links ? This allows me to make photos/videos available to Dropbox without taking extra space. If this is possible, what happens if the Dropbox deamon deletes a file represented by a hard link? Is then only the hardlink gone or also the underlying file?

If hardlinks are a possbility how can I recursively hardlink all files in directory A into directory B?

If hardlinks do not help, what other possiblities do I have?

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  • From Dropbox's site: "Can I have Dropbox sync files outside my Dropbox folder? Right now, Dropbox will only sync the files in your Dropbox folder." for you questions about the hard-links, it seems like something you should be able to easily test yourself; so what have you tried/researched already and what were the results? Aug 15, 2016 at 20:01
  • Yes that is from an Dropbox daemon perspective. My question is about Filesys solutions such as hardlinks so that files are visible in Dropbox folder while protected against deletion and not taking extra space
    – robert
    Aug 15, 2016 at 20:04
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    I find that a symbolic link in the DropBox folder to an external directory works fine. In my case the link points to a folder on the same drive, but I don't see a reason why it should not work equally well when the link points to a different local drive, though I recall problems in Windows when trying to use a network drive. Simply use ln -s /mnt/myhd/MyPhotosVideos /mnt/myhd/Dropbox/.
    – AFH
    Aug 15, 2016 at 20:21
  • If you don't want sync, just push the files to Dropbox. You can watch any folder with cron and script the push. Also this question is a duplicate.
    – jiggunjer
    Aug 16, 2016 at 16:53
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