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Split my Dropbox between my internal SSD and an external drive?

Is this possible? Maybe with Dropbox Business?

What I do:

I have a desktop that I render architecture scenes on. It has tons of storage.

But I also have a laptop with limited storage that I set up scenes and work from. I'd like to keep my most-used Dropbox folders on my laptop interal drive for when I'm on the go. But then put my hundreds of gigs of rendering assets on an external drive and have it sync via Dropbox so that it's always up-to-date on my desktop that I actually render on.

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Dropbox Business

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Accepted answers

Rich

No, that's not possible. Dropbox will only sync to a single location.

Mark

Few things to remember
-Dropbox do NOT support symlinks so if things go wrong you are on your own
-Disconnecting an external drive while Dropbox is running can cause mass-deletion of data
-Symlinks as above will only sync once upon every boot up/reindex. It wont 'real time' sync.

All comments

Rich

No, that's not possible. Dropbox will only sync to a single location.

roarkarch

Gotcha. That stinks. Perhaps I'll look into a second service to only store my assets on and just keep using Dropbox for my more regular files.

BitDropper

While this is not a direct Dropbox function, there is a solution to your problem. What you want to do is create a symlink to your external drive. This should do exactly what you want, but use this trick at your own risk since changes on Dropbox’s end could cause unwanted behavior in the future.

I did, however, test it. I did this by setting up the files where they were on a disk other than the C drive that I took offline to see how it would handle it. The file still exists on the Dropbox server and obviously cannot be access from the linked folder. I think the biggest thing to remember here is that if you ever changed files on the external drive when it is not connected to the machine with the symlink, then it will not be backed up on Dropbox.

I hope this helps.

Mark

roarkarch

What I've decided to do is just install a second SSD in my laptop. It's 1TB and not cheap; but it'll solve all my woes and be the simplest and most-reliable solution.

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