How can I use Dropbox to back up arbitrary folders?

Symlinks are no longer followed in dropbox, so this answer won't help: How can I make dropbox back up folders in my Home Folder like Music?

I have photos folder, I'm on Ubuntu, I want to back up my photos. I don't want to organize my entire system around the drop box folder. Further, my dropbox folder is on a different HD than my photos are.

What I'd like to do is tell dropbox that the photos folder should also be uploaded, and it's okay to have more than one folder being backed up.

How can I do this?

Solution 1:

Annoying, indeed, where Dropbox, for an unknown reason, deliberately decided to break linux symlinks. You can still work around by using mount --bind instead. Far less convenient, because you need to be superuser to be able to do this.

The following example of a line in /etc/fstab would automatically mount --bind a folder Photos in user's home folder to a similarly named folder in the Dropbox folder during startup:

/home/user/Photos /home/user/Dropbox/Photos none bind,x-gvfs-hide 0 0

The x-gvfs-hide option prevents the mount from being shown in the left pane of your file manager