Time Machine and Dropbox

Ok, I have discovered a problem with Time Machine, sort of. I have a couple of document directories that I discovered aren't being backed up routinely by Time Machine.

It so happens that theses directories are also synched with Dropbox, both for "backup" and to have access to these documents on other devices.

By synched, I mean I created a symlink to the directories on my Mac in Dropbox.

The bottom two posts in this thread note what I have observed. http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/ot...pletely-back-up-time-machine.html#post1649810

Looking around, I have found that including the local Dropbox folder in Time Machine backups is wasteful, so I have excluded it, but I don't believe that's the issue here.

I think the Dropbox synch is locking the document folders/directories and preventing their backup. I guess one solution is to turn off Dropbox. I have seen some other stuff about changing permissions on the dropbox folder, but it was for mountain lion.

Any ideas?

2xhorn said:

Looking around, I have found that including the local Dropbox folder in Time Machine backups is wasteful, so I have excluded it, but I don't believe that's the issue here.

Click to expand...

Actually that may well be the issue. Time Machine may be seeing the "excluded" symlink in the Dropbox folder and, by extension, excluding the folder the symlink points to. Try un-excluding the Dropbox folder and see what happens.

Lifeisabeach said:

Actually that may well be the issue. Time Machine may be seeing the "excluded" symlink in the Dropbox folder and, by extension, excluding the folder the symlink points to. Try un-excluding the Dropbox folder and see what happens.

Click to expand...

Interesting thought, but, alas, I didn't exclude Dropbox until discovering and diving into this issue last night.

Further, I added another folder to Dropbox, again by putting a symlink to it in Dropbox on March 2 and further backups of that folder ceased on that date as well. So something is happening that prevents time machine from backing up folders synched with dropbox that are not in the dropbox folder

Spent some time with Apple Care yesterday. Unlike previous versions of dropbox and osx, there shouldn't be a compatibility issue and I can't think of anything I did that would have caused the dropbox synced files not to back up. Except that I may have run the first time machine backup before the symlinks were in place. I had reinstalled OSX after having a java problem and restored my data files from dropbox when the first backup occurred. I don't recall whether I had set the symlinks back up or not at that time.

Anyway, I deleted my TM backup and started over again, and the dropbox-synced files/folders were successfully backed up.

If, like me, you thought you had double-redundancy with dropbox, may be worth a look to make sure.

Following back up on this, it's still a problem. Although TM backed up the synced folders initially, it has not done so since.

Again, if you think you are double redundant with dropbox, you probably arent.