It's genius. And you save quite a lot of space if you need to put your files outside your Dropbox folder. That or you put all your files directly in your Dropbox folder if you don't need to.

You should see the mess of directory links I have between my HDD and my SSD.

I've done this for years. As an added bonus, if you view the files on the dropbox website, you can right click one to restore it to a previous version (saved back to couple months?), acting as an automatic primitive form of version control for all your files.


Also, for those using Windows who want to get a bit dirty, you can actually back up your entire Documents folder, which is what I did. This has the added bonus that all your files still look like they're in the right place, and you and your programs can continue to use your Documents folder, but all changes are instantly reflected on Dropbox. You can't make this change when you're logged in normally, as you'd have to move, rename, or delete your existing Documents folder to make the link and Windows won't let you do that, but you can get around that by booting into "repair your computer" mode in Windows 7/8 (possibly lower versions?) and doing it from a command prompt there.

I had to do something similar at work. A team wanted to share a common Adobe Digital Editions library, but ADE forces the library to your Documents folder. So I made a symlink towards a directory on the company's servers that holds the actual library.

I should do this with my Documents folder on my laptop. I have 50GB of available space on by Dropbox, so I might as well make use of it.

EDIT: I did it, I switched my Documents on my 50 GB Dropbox. It's simple really.

(For Windows 7)
1. Choose the location where you want Dropbox to place it's files, or let it take the default location. You need to take note of where it's placed.
2. Right-click your Documents folder and select Properties.
    a. In the location tab, change the path to your Dropbox folder. Press OK or Apply.
    b. A window will ask you if you want to move your Documents there. Select Yes.

Your documents will be moved in the Dropbox folder and Dropbox will sync all your files on your cloud storage. You could do the same on another computer and have a synced cloud-based Documents folder, plus a backup solution in case your files falls in an unrecoverable state.

Oh nice idea Soru ! Once my RPi is free from using it as a WiFi hotspot at school () I'll set it up for network services and as a backup server.

Oh btw, i bought a 2TB external hdd for backups and connected that one to my rpi.
No, it is not overkill to have a rpi with a 2TB hdd

That's a good idea, using a RPi as a storage server.  I think it's called a NAS or something.