[SOLVED] SugarSync on Mac puts files in Trash, “alias” problems

Like many oth­ers, I have started using cloud ser­vices to sync my data across com­put­ers. Although there are many nice alter­na­tives like Drop­box and so on, my choice until now is Sug­ar­Sync. It is very nice and it has com­pletely removed the man­ual copy­ing of files using FTP that I used to do. I really like the way it is designed and it works well.

But I had an prob­lem with Sug­ar­Sync on Mac OS X. The rea­son is that I like to put aliases on the desk­top to the fold­ers I work with often. (Alias cor­re­spond to “short­cut” in Win­dows). It turned out that my aliases on the desk­top were point­ing to fold­ers and files in the Trash! First I did­n’t notice it because the trash folder actu­ally looks like any other folder. I noticed it because changes I had done on another com­puter were not updated.

The SugarSync trash problem

Later I under­stood why: when there are newer files in the cloud, Sug­ar­Sync deletes the older files and puts them in the trash. So when click­ing on the alias, I would end up brows­ing files in the Trash! It is like this because aliases in Mac OS X are point­ing in two ways. If you move the file the alias is point­ing to to another folder, the link will still work (unlike short­cuts in Win­dows that are only point­ing in one way). If you move the linked file to the trash, the alias will point to the trash. Same thing when Sug­ar­Sync is delet­ing files. I tried to use sym­bolic links using the ln ‑s at the com­mand line but it seemed that OS X has changed the mean­ing of ln and sym­bolic links, at least for fold­ers, quite strange. Maybe Drop­box or other cloud ser­vices would be bet­ter, but I think they work in the same way — older files are moved to the trash.

The rem­edy was to use a com­mand line soft­ware pack­age called hardlink. It is easy to install pro­vided you have the gcc com­piler. (If you don’t, it can be down­loaded from the xcode pack­age). The hardlink pack­age can be down­loaded from Sam’s site and it con­tains all the infor­ma­tion you need includ­ing instal­la­tion instruc­tions and how to use the command.

For me, this solved the annoy­ing Sug­ar­Sync ver­sus Trash prob­lems and now I can work the way I like, using aliases on the desk­top to my cur­rent project fold­ers. The only draw­back with this approach that I have noticed until now is that when open­ing the folder with the hardlink, the icons inside it don’t show the green lit­tle dot indi­cat­ing that it’s synced. On the other hand, it can be nice to not see it too because it makes a rather ugly look, so in the end, this can be regarded as a pos­i­tive fea­ture as well.

Note 1: Sug­ar­Sync is not per­fect. It is not sync­ing some­times. On Win­dows machines, it seems like I have to uninstall/resinstall the soft­ware. On Mac it’s enough to exit the soft­ware and restart it.

Note 2: When the hardlink folder is opened it looks just like nor­mal, but it turns out that it does mot really behave like a native folder cre­ated iin a nor­mal way in Mac OS. For exam­ple, is does not update what is dis­played auto­mat­i­cally if files are changed or if time or date stamps are changed. Also, if drag­ging mul­ti­ple files to the hardlink folder, only one of them will be dis­played, but actu­ally, all are there. By mov­ing back and forth to another folder, the con­tents will dis­play cor­rectly. This can be okay for a while, but I will try to make bet­ter hardlinks I the future.

Note 3: I turned out that I never rally liked “hardlink” so I am not using it any­more. I keep the post if some­one is inter­ested. I tried also using the bidfs pack­age, thanks again, Sam for your advices. It took for­ever to install but worked well. Still, in the end, I did­n’t like that the folder icons looked like USB disks or net­work dri­ves and also I did­n’t like that they could­n’t be renamed so finally I gave up.

Conclusion

Use a sim­ple folder struc­ture instead so it will be eas­ier to access the files. That is what I do now.

The only thing that remains to worry me now is that sud­denly Sug­ar­Sync may be taken down by author­i­ties because other than me are stor­ing ille­gal files, what ever that would be, but that’s another story.