Browse and DropBox Backups - aliases are not browsable, so can't see Pictures folder!
This is a strange one, and I can't find anything here or in Dropbox support, so I'm hoping someone here can help! I have activated Dropbox Backup, and am backing up my Pictures folder (and a couple others) from my Mac home directory. When you do this, Dropbox creates aliases for those folders to /Users/(username)/Dropbox/Mac/Foldername. So my "Pictures" folder is now an alias to /Users/lewbrown/Dropbox/Mac/Pictures. While these aliases are visible, navigable and work fine in the Finder, On1 Browse does not see them at all!. So I can not navigate at all to the Pictures folder from Browse. That Folder contains ALL of my pictures and catalogued folders, so I'm kind of stuck now! Before I go and turn off the Backup (and lose a couple days of uploading!), I wanted to know if anyone knows a way around this.....I've created my own aliases in terminal before which On1 Browse navigated without issue, but the ones Dropbox created don't seem to work! Any help appreciated!
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Quick update: I've done a lot more research, this is an On1 problem. Those folders that I am backing up (including Pictures) show up in all other applications and are navigable to within them. So, it appears to me that On1 browse doesn't recognize MacOS aliases, which is definitely an issue! I am running latest 2022.5 release build on MacOS 12.4.
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Sounds like something tech support would need to look at. You can open a ticket at the link below.
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On the Mac, there are aliases and then there are aliases. This doesn't include the new Firmlinks Mac OS can create. Photo RAW recognizes hard links, the kind made in Terminal, but not soft links. I have to assume Dropbox is making soft links. It also depends upon what the link is pointing to. For instance, creating any kind of link that points inside an Apple Photos Library will not work with Photo RAW.
I recommend adding an external drive to your system for making backups.
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Thanks both…. I will contact support. FYI, I already back up to 2 separate external drives, and using Dropbox for a 3rd offsite backup. I know there are different aliases (and symlinks), but whatever Dropbox created, they work fine in all other apps, it’s only Browse that seems to not be able to navigate them….
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About the time of the recent ON1 Photo RAW update, a slew of problems began: Crashes every few minutes in Browse, Edit, and Resize; inability to locate image files in Browse; fun watching indexed folders evaporate one-by-one (but remaining on my hard drive, thank goodness), etc. I rolled back to the previous version, but that did not help.
Before troubleshooting further, I checked my local backup external drive to make sure all my photos were safely archived. (I use Carbon Copy Cloner regularly for the backups.) To my surprise, there were NO image files "downstream" of the Dropbox aliases (or whatever they are) on the external drive. Oops. (Ditto for my Time Machine backup!)
I uninstalled Dropbox, then moved the image folders in the Finder to get them "upstream" of the Dropbox aliases, which were still present.
Photo RAW was instantly transformed. No crashing or other problems. After a reboot, the Dropbox aliases were gone. (In Capture One Pro, which had been working OK, I had to re–synch some folders, but not all. Go figure.)
Not exactly obvious what the problem really was. But, bye-bye Dropbox.
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Hi David...Interesting, that certainly is not good, and it got me worried. I use SuperDuper for cloning (backups), and it does not have the issue you described for Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) on my backups; the aliases (symlinks, whatever) on the backups work as intended and all the images are still there (phew!).
So, it seems that whatever DropBox is making, they are not well enough defined for all applications to recognize. In my case, all the Adobe products, MS Office products, Affinity products, etc. seem to have no issues with the "aliases"; they work as intended. On1 seems to be the only app that has a problem with them.
What's most upsetting about this is that DropBox (as they typically do) just tells you "do this and now you have an online backup". There's no documentation on their site that tells you beforehand that they are going to make such dramatic changes to the filesystem... That's really bad practice IMHO!
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Lew,
I agree, my other apps (including Affinity Publisher and Photo and Capture One) worked fine before I removed DropBox's artifacts and continue to do so afterward (except for the CO folder re-synching I mentioned).
It had been several months since I looked at the CCC backup, and it was as expected then, even though DropBox had been installed and synching for several years. (I really did not expect Time Machine to lose contact with reality, but it did. No photos in it as far back as I can look. It shows Mac>User>Pictures>Dropbox>nada.) I also back up all my photos and other files to Carbonite, and everything looks good there.
The ON1 Photo RAW crashes must have involved it's trying to use directory paths that went off into space or somewhere.
Oh, well, bits and bytes...
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Hi David,
Thanks for the further comments. I did go ahead and open a ticket on this, and will report back here if I get a resolution... I'm also going to give DropBox a piece of my mind relative to their "willy-nilly" unwarned changes to critical parts of the filesystem! No warnings or anything...
I was originally going to use BackBlaze for this (off-site backup), but since my employer pays for a ton of space on Dropbox (which I don't use all of), I took the "easy route" and just set this up..... I think I may go back to BackBlaze after this 🤣
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