Hello.

I am trying to backup my home directory to Dropbox using a symlink, e.g.

Though my 'Dropbox' directory is within my home directory (obviously) and appears to be causing problems with this method of getting my nonsense reliably into Dropbox via this idea.

Does anyone have a workaround, suggestion, or slap-in-the-face for me regarding this situation?

Thanks so much, all is received with gratitude.

Please ignore this.
@Mods, if possible, please remove this post, it has done mistakenly. I posted my answer in below post.

Backup and creation of a symlink both are different tasks. You can create a symlink named fedoraBackup inside /home/dereism/Dropbox of your home dir. i.e. /home/dereism for ease of access to home directory, but it doesn't means that home dir. has been backed up.

If you want to backup your home dir. then simply create it's tar file, zip it, and copy it to some external drive or on some other file system.

Excuse me for my ignorance. (I understand I was using the term 'backup' flippantly, I was merely trying to simplify an issue.)

To put it even more simply, I would like the contents of my home directory mirrored in Dropbox. I'm asking for help accomplishing this task. Unfortunately, the Dropbox dir exists within the dir to be linked and this appears to be causing problems with my linux install. I've done this successfully under OS X, and it seems to work in theory based on my experience with a foreign OS.

I'm not trying to be weird.

Edit: I seem to be asking for the impossible (even though it isn't, under other systems). I'll just stumble back to SSH like I am supposed to.

Edit second: This appears to be a known issue. Folks are simply using git, .gitignore, and github with Dropbox to circumvent this issue, apparently.

Alright. But what's problem when you're creating a symlink of home directory i.e. /home/dereism/ in /home/dereism/Dropbox?

Even this once looks ok:
Once check manual here.

The Dropbox directory (which is something of a symlink in of itself) being included within my example cli symlink creation causes Dropbox under Fedora to completely fall apart. I can't even provide a bug report, because the symptoms keep changing. Usually, it just sits at 'starting' until I delete the linked directory in Dropbox and reboot:

Sometimes Dropbox is sitting at 'indexing' in what appears to be an infinite loop until, again, the linked directory is deleted from Dropbox followed by a reboot.

The CPU is pegged at 99% during these events.

This behavior, while understandable, isn't replicated under other operating systems to the best of my knowledge and experience.

Edit: This appears to be a bug in Dropbox's support for Fedora, perhaps linux in general, though based on the response here I am guessing the former (me suspects Debian preference 'round these parts . The Dropbox interface seems smart enough to ignore itself under other systems, in fact my reading suggests it is doing just that: Ignoring itself. The .gitignore file containing 'Dropbox/' within a private Github repo of my home directory which is then pushed to Dropbox seems like the only solution at this point. Though this seems like quite a problem, and I am not sure who to turn to for complaint. I'll get annoyed with issuing git commands every morning, though I suppose it will just fall in line with 'yum update'.

Thanks for the attention.