You may have downloaded and installed Dropbox on your mac, but now want to remove Dropbox from your mac for one reason or another. Also, it facilitates good collaboration and boost productivity within a team. This technique seems to work for other special folders too (Downloads, Documents, etc).Dropbox makes the work no longer be deskbound, we don’t need to bring the laptop, hard drive or storage devices along with us anymore.
I welcome any suggestions on improving this technique - specifically how to invoke all the actions through the command line or retaining the icon in the Sidebar. I do not yet know a way to restore that icon (and it may not be possible). Note that the icon for the Desktop in the Sidebar will be replaced by a generic Folder icon. Restore the shortcut in the Favorites by navigating in Finder to the Dropbox and dragging the Desktop to the Sidebar. It saves storage and minimizes synchronicity issues by only keeping one copy of the content on the disk.įinally, I've observed that this technique causes the Desktop to be lost from the Sidebar / Favorites. The above technique should work on the first machine, but also subsequent machines, even if the new machines already have content on the Desktop (which gets merged with the cloud-hosted copy). Then, create the symbolic link so that the Desktop is available from both locations: ln -s Dropbox/Desktop ~/Desktop Sudo is required to remove that folder because it is system-managed. Now you're ready to remove the old Desktop folder. Next, restore the icon for the Desktop folder by navigating to your Dropbox/Desktop folder in Finder, invoking Get Info on it, selecting the icon in the upper right, and pasting the icon that you copied earlier (⌘V). Select the folder icon in the upper left and copy it to the clipboard (⌘C). Open Finder and navigate to your home directory, select the Desktop, and then Get Info on it (⌘I). The only way I know to do that is to copy it to the clipboard using Finder. However, you can't do that while there's an existing Folder at ~/Desktop, so you'll want to remove it.īefore you do that, though, you'll probably want to retain the Folder icon for the Desktop. Next, you want to create a symlink so that ~/Desktop redirects to ~/Dropbox/Desktop. # move local files to the Dropbox-hosted Desktop So to move the files: # ensure the directory exists on Dropbox I'll assume for now that you have Dropbox installed as ~/Dropbox and your Desktop as ~/Desktop. You can put your Desktop anywhere in Dropbox, but I recommend directly as Dropbox/Desktop. Since you want the content from your Desktop in Dropbox, I recommend first moving the content on your Desktop to Dropbox. To disable it again, enter crontab -e and delete this line, then save. You can change the 12 to * to do this every hour. This will make a backup every day, at 12:00. Then, paste the following, and save: 0 12 * * * rsync -rt -delete ~/Desktop/ ~/Dropbox/Desktop/ If you just want to copy the items, you can open your Terminal, and enter: mkdir -p ~/Dropbox/Desktop Here, uncheck your Desktop.Ī very static, non-preferred way involves setting up cron. If you ever want to disable it, right-click your Desktop icon from Finder, and select Services » Folder Action Setup. create a new folder and delete it right away) to force a sync. If you delete an item from your Desktop, there will be no changes, so you have to add something (e.g. Now, this will run by default, and whenever an item is added to your Desktop, it will be mirrored with the Dropbox. rsync -rta -delete ~/Desktop/ ~/Dropbox/Desktop/ To the Automator action, add a Run Shell Script action from the left pane. Then, open up Automator.app and create a new Folder Action. First, create the Dropbox folder where you want your desktop files to stay, e.g. This will – whenever you add a new file – synchronize your Desktop with a Dropbox folder of your choice.