Last week I made the switch from a Windows based gaming laptop (which was rarely used for gaming) to a Macbook Pro 13” which I now use as my general home machine. While I haven’t yet become an evangelising mac devotee proclaiming Apple superiority to one and all, I have been very pleased with the experience.

In order that I might keep my files organised and accessible across devices, I turned to my existing Dropbox account for synchronisation.

Firstly I renamed the existing documents and pictures folders:

mv /users/ed/Documents /users/ed/DocumentsLocal

mv /users/ed/Pictures /users/ed/PicturesLocal

Then I symlinked these folders to my Dropbox folder:

ln -s /users/ed/Dropbox/Public/Mac Docs/Pictures /users/ed/Pictures

ln -s /users/ed/Dropbox/Public/Mac Docs/Documents /users/ed/Documents

Now the default save location on my Macbook for documents and pictures is automatically sync’d to all my devices. Documents can be shared via public link without being relocated. This may be a simple adjustment, but it has already saved me time when editing cross-platform documents such as Word docs and PDF files on other machines.