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I am using Dropbox for storing my dotfiles from which I create soft links to my home directory. For configuration files which I do edit by myself it works very good, however applications like firefox do overwrite them when changes in settings are made. Obvious solution would be to symlink all folder where the useful configuration files are, but then I bloat my Dropbox synchronization with cookies, caches and other trash files. So its not a solution for me.

Other kind of solution I can think of is making a script which is executed every second which keeps files synchronized. Is this the best option? Could there be something I could do with mount command for having two folders appear as one and changes reflected to the folders from where the files comes from?

Jānis Erdmanis
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  • Never took the time to get it right, but this might be a good starting point: https://dotfiles.github.io/ Of course you don't need to host it on github, I guess the git repo could live inside the Dropbox. – Jakob Lenfers Dec 27 '16 at 17:25
  • git approach requires to push commit and pull changes manually. That would stand in my way. – Jānis Erdmanis Dec 27 '16 at 17:50
  • Why do you worry about bloat in this case? Is it storage, performance or security that concerns you? I use Dropbox this way extensively (sync between Win/MacOS/Linux) and never had any problems. What you are asking is the precise use case of symlinks. Alternative would be bind mounts, but I see no benefits. You definitely do not want to roll your own synchronization scripts, this will get very messy very quickly, keep it simple. Dropbox excels at this and you use it already. – rszalski Jan 03 '17 at 08:54
  • @szalski You are right about simplicity. I would not want to manage my own synchronization scripts. However I keep my mind open with possibility of creating "unremovable symlinks" with single background process for each file. Bind mounts for single file however seems to disappear when the mounted file is deleted. If it would be possible to keep mount point despite file being deleted it would form an ideal solution for me. – Jānis Erdmanis Jan 04 '17 at 20:48

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yadm is like having a version of Git, that only operates on your dotfiles. If you know how to use Git, you already know how to use yadm.

You can add any single file or directory you wish. It is also possible to look at changes over time in an efficient way! The 'overview' and 'getting started' page are a great help.

(Yadm DOCS)

Stephen Rauch
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PuzzledCuber
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