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You’re Doing That Wrong is a journal of various successes and failures by Dan Sturm.

The One With Dropbox and the Symlink

I’ll be honest, this post is more for me than it is for you. I’m writing it so the next time I’m setting up a new Mac, I’ll know exactly where to find the solution to one of Dropbox’s most puzzling idiosyncrasies.

Dropbox users, like myself, who have both a personal Dropbox account and a business account, have the ability to link those two accounts and sync both folders to a single computer [1]. When you do that, your folder previously-named Dropbox is renamed to Dropbox (Personal) and your business account is named Your Company Dropbox. Which…seems silly to me, but okay, I guess.

Aside from being an unattractive folder name, Dropbox (Personal) is pretty terrible for automation and general usability. Spaces? Parentheses? It’s like they’re trying to break all my scripts and customizations.

And before you ask, no, you can’t just rename the folder back to Dropbox. Once you install the Dropbox app, the computer belongs to them, you’re just allowed to use it. Them’s the rules.

Now, when I first linked my two Dropbox accounts, I could have gone through all my Keyboard Maestro macros and shell scripts and done some find & replace work to make everything work again. But as fun as that sounds, I opted for the lazy route: creating a symlink called Dropbox that pointed to Dropbox (Personal) so all my stuff would just work again.

If I were smarter and better versed in the ways of the Terminal, I wouldn’t have to look this sort of stuff up when I needed to do it. Alas, this isn’t the sort of thing I need to do more than once every handful of years, and this knowledge will leave my brain the second I close that Terminal window.

I’m Writing It Down to Remember It Later

Here’s what I did:

  1. Make a symlink to “Dropbox (Personal)” and place it on the Desktop, thusly:
    ln -s "/Users/dansturm/Dropbox (Personal)" /Users/dansturm/Desktop

  2. Next rename the symlink on the Desktop to just “Dropbox”.

  3. Move the symlink into your Home directory, next to the ugly folder.

  4. Hide the symlink so you can forget you ever had to do this whole stupid thing:
    chflags -h hidden /Users/dansturm/Dropbox

And now your scripts, automations, file paths, etc, will function just as they did before Dropbox decided to get cutesy with the name of the folder where you keep everything you’ve ever created on your Mac for the past 10+ years.

  1. You can link one personal account to one business account and that’s it. You can’t have two personal accounts or two business accounts or three of any combination. Kinda makes you think this whole linking thing was a bit of an afterthought.  ↩