Symbolic Links

**RealG187** · July 9th, 2009

Does anyone know how the Ubuntu client handles symbolic links? Will it upload the symbolic link or the file it links to?

Because if it uploads the actual file then I could use symbolic links to upload files outside the folder I cannot move (like my knotes folder)

**jpeddicord** · July 12th, 2009

Doesn't look like it does. Symlinked an outside folder and Ubuntu One just ignores it completely.

**RealG187** · July 14th, 2009

Originally Posted by jacobmp92

Doesn't look like it does. Symlinked an outside folder and Ubuntu One just ignores it completely.

That sucks, I love symlinks.

But I found a way around that.

For my Knotes (/home/dope/.kde/share/apps/knotes) instead of making "/home/dope/Ubuntu One/My Files/knotes" a symlink to "/home/dope/.kde/share/apps/knotes" I made "/home/dope/.kde/share/apps/knotes" a symlink to "/home/dope/Ubuntu One/My Files/knotes"

**renkinjutsu** · July 17th, 2009

you can probably use hardlinks .. although pretty useless since it doesn't work for directories

**lodp** · July 17th, 2009

I just received my invitation, and after installing I was a bit disappointed about the symlink thing. Dropbox does work with symlinks.

Is there a reason why ubuntu one doesn't support that? Is it planned to be supported?

It seems eminently useful for backing up / syncing application data (knotes is a good example, but I'd also like to use it for thunderbird, firefox, korganizer and such)

**zekopeko** · July 17th, 2009

Originally Posted by lodp

I just received my invitation, and after installing I was a bit disappointed about the symlink thing. Dropbox does work with symlinks.

Is there a reason why ubuntu one doesn't support that? Is it planned to be supported?

It seems eminently useful for backing up / syncing application data (knotes is a good example, but I'd also like to use it for thunderbird, firefox, korganizer and such)

i think they will implement symlinking at some point. but the whole point of u1 is so that you don't need to symlink application data yourself. it will do it for you.
i know that they are working on contact sync with evolution contacts (it's probably going to be expanded to empathy/pidgin contacts also) and desktop screen sharing.
at a latter date they could easily implement application settings sync for all of the major desktop app.
and not to mention that the client is open source so they could also simply provide an API for applications to plugin to so that they don't have to wait for the u1 team to do it for them.

**lodp** · July 17th, 2009

wouldn't it take ages for all the applications to support that?

also, it's not just application data that many people like to backup and sync - it's also documents and other stuff that resides somewhere in a folder structure outside the ubuntu one folder, and symlinks would be great for that.

I'm planning to do this with dropbox for the time being -- does anybody know whether there's an inherent problem with symlinking application data into a synced folder (and if so, is that why ubuntu one doesn't support it)?

**Primefalcon** · July 18th, 2009

hard links do work (of course) but sym links no

**nortexoid** · October 30th, 2009

Can you hard link a folder? Or can you symlink it and hard link that to get it to work?

**krippa** · May 5th, 2010

This seems like it should be a top priority but the new Ubuntu one client in Lucid still doesn't support this!

I have my docs, pictures etc. on a partition separate from my home folder so it seems I am completely out of luck.. And I was even thinking of getting 50GB subscription for my photos. For now I am stuck with Dropbox..

Symlinks ASAP please!

Does anyone know if symlink support is planned?