Options for auto back up via watched folder

Shrimply

Hi Guys,

I'm trying to find a way to automatically backup a folder on my computer.

I know I could just work in a dropbox or onedrive folder but I like the way my things are organised sensibly on my PC. It seems neither dropbox or onedrive offer a watched folder option, which I find very strange but I guess it goes against their main purpose of syncing between machines.

In an ideal world I'd probably use SyncTool to copy the contents from my folder to Dropbox regularly. However, my PC is desperately short of storage space, something that needs sorted but not immediately, so I can't afford to have the data on the disk twice.

So is there any options, or ways around this that I'm missing?

Geodark

So why not just create or use a folder in the onedrive / dropbox folders and use that instead of the other folder? Then it will be automatically backed up?

Fightsback

Use symbolic links, see here for handy pre-written guide:

http://www.howtogeek.com/194431/how-to-sync-any-folder-to-the-cloud-with-symbolic-links/?PageSpeed=noscript

Skullduggery

If you want backup to cloud then dropbox/onedrive along with a symbolic link or junction point to your folder

If you have more than one machine however and dont want your data stored in the cloud a good alternative is Bittorrent Sync. It does the same task but syncs the files directly between your devices and not into the cloud.

Shrimply

Geodark wrote: »

So why not just create or use a folder in the onedrive / dropbox folders and use that instead of the other folder? Then it will be automatically backed up?

To quote myself

I know I could just work in a dropbox or onedrive folder but I like the way my things are organised sensibly on my PC.

Symbolic links... never heard of them. I feel I should have. That's ****** brilliant.

Have a feeling this new knowledge will also solve a long standing problem with my reference manager and it's determination to use a specific folder.

It seems to be working, the link says Dropbox doesn't play well with them though. Does anyone know why, I'd rather have the symbolic link in the Dropbox folder than the folder physically located there.

Fightsback

Shrimply wrote: »

To quote myself

Symbolic links... never heard of them. I feel I should have. That's ****** brilliant.

Have a feeling this new knowledge will also solve a long standing problem with my reference manager and it's determination to use a specific folder.

It seems to be working, the link says Dropbox doesn't play well with them though. Does anyone know why, I'd rather have the symbolic link in the Dropbox folder than the folder physically located there.

I don't use dropbox myself but there is a thread on this over at the dropbox forum.

https://www.dropboxforum.com/hc/communities/public/questions/201893105-Dropbox-not-syncing-properly-with-folders-created-by-symbolic-links

paddyrg

sugarsync any good? You can tell it which folders to watch as opposed to rely on a root dropbox/onedrive/whatever folder

Shrimply

So, say I was to place a symbolic link to the folder in the dropbox folder and then use a bat file and windows task schedular to restart dropbox every 5 hours or so.

It will back up the folder contents every 5 hours to the cloud?

Is that daft?