Synchronize files in Windows or across PCs using Symbolic Links

Check out these handy little guys…

 

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/16226/complete-guide-to-symbolic-links-symlinks-on-windows-or-linux/" target=”_blank”>http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/16226/complete-guide-to-symbolic-links-symlinks-on-windows-or-linux/

 

Very niche, but might come in handy someday.  What this does is sync a file to multiple directory locations on a hard drive.  i.e. same file exists in C:\Folder A as in C:\Folder B and updates both if you make changes to one or the other.

 

I’ve been using them a while to do a couple different things:

 

  1. Keep files synced between multiple cloud file storage services without having to modify both (i.e. dbox & gdrive).  I’m in the process of trying both and don’t want to bother manually updating two files with the same changes.

 

  1. Awesome if you have a specific file you want to be synchronized across multiple computers, for whatever reason.  For example, I used to have save game files that I’d want synchronized between my laptop and desktop PCs.  I create a hard symbolic link from the save game file in C:\Program Files\Steam\SaveFile to my Dropbox folder and then I can do the same on a second computer… thus synccing the file across multiple computers real-time-ish.