@bnpndxtr01 You have a strong point with that suggestion; improving the prompt is indeed in our to-do list. 
@dnarnold, my apologies for the wrong choice of words-- I should have said that symlink support is not supported on Insync 3, and a workaround is to instead sync the target folder via Local Selective Sync. Thank you for pointing that out.
I have the same problem. Is there any fix perspective?
Linux is symlink based… There is a lot of them on my acccount
We are working on this with our engineers to address the prompt. Were you trying to sync any symlinks at the time it popped up? If so, could you try to sync the target folder via Local Selective Sync instead?
Yes, all those warnings aren’t good at all… Perhaps I miss a really important warning among them.
For me it would be important to sync the symlink itself, and not the target file or directory.
Syncing the target folder is already addressed by the ‘local selective sync’.
Suppose a create a symlink and Insync creates a copy (not a link) of the target. In another computer I’ll have two copies of this file! If I edit one of them I’ll have a huge consistency problem! And how the original box will handle the mapping of two distinct files back to a file and a symlink?
I don’t really care how Google Drive will interpret the symlink in the web interface. I just like to have my Linux boxes synced accordingly.
Hi everyone!
I had the same problem with the update, will Insync don’t support these symlinks anymore or it will be solved in a future update?
Hi. I’m suffering the same issue since one of the updates. Any chance this will be fixed somehow? It’s really annoying to have those errors every time the application starts.
Hi! You can disable these prompts by going to the three-dot menu on the upper right > Preferences > uncheck the third box
This is not a solution. Disabeling all messages is not the same as disabeling only the symlinks messages
I totally agree with you jander. It would be great if we could just sync the symlink itself, without the folder to that link, since the folder can be synced otherwises.
Symlink files being different on windows and linux is not a big deal, if both types are synchronised, resulting in two link-files being shown in the folder, one for Windows and one for Linux, one working in one system and the other one in the other. The user can deal with this in his own way.
I’m not sure how long this setting has existed, but you are correct, there is a setting I can disable called “Show warning prompts about unsynced symlinks”. This seems to be the solution everyone on this thread wants with regard to notifications.
Regarding actually syncing symlinks, I agree it’d be useful and interesting. I’m not sure how it would work… Insync detects a local symlink and then creates a “fake” text file in Google drive with some special format that Insync would detect so it could create a local symlink on another computer in the same way as the first computer. Maybe it’s a JSON file at the root of the tree or possibly individual text files with a name like “symlink:link_name” and the content would be the file path that you’d get with the Linux readlink utility (print resolved symbolic links or canonical file names).
@dnarnold I’m trying to do something similar (but mainly for backup and restore purposes, not for a concurrent home drive across multiple machines). How is your Insync set up? Is your base folder the same as your home directory or do you just use the default location and then selective local sync your home/user folder? Upon initial setup, I selected the /home folder as my base folder and now it’s syncing everything, which I guess is what I wanted. But not sure what will happen to my home directory if I change my InSync base folder.
Here is my approach. I have several computers (home desktop, office desktop, various laptops), all running a recent version of Ubuntu Linux. The home directories of each of these contain several directories (bin, Desktop, lib, …) which are specific to the local machine and are not synced to google drive. But the rest of the home directory is synced between all machines as follows. Each home directory contains a directory Insync/gdrive. This is my Insync folder on each of the machines, so when anything in this directory is changed on any of my machines, the change is propagated by Insync to google drive and from there back to all the other machines. (On all machines I have “Sync new children of partially-synced folders automatically” set and “Sync new top-level cloud items automatically” unset).
Inside Insync/gdrive I have a directory called home and inside that a bunch of subdirectories (programs, images, …) which is where the main contents of my home directory reside. To make it easier to access these I have symlinks
~/programs -> Insync/gdrive/home/programs
~/images -> Insync/gdrive/home/images
etc.
This works nearly perfectly for my needs. The one thing that does not work is symlinks inside the directory Insync/gdrive/home. If I create or delete a symlink on one machine, I have to manually create it on all the other machines.
In the past I have used Insync to backup symlinked files and folders for years with no issues, and when I had signed up for the service, this was a major marketing and selling point.
Why was this feature dropped? It really was very useful.
Hi @Niko_Z,
In 1.x, symlink support worked such that Insync syncs the target of the symlink — on the cloud, it’s as if the target folder is directly in the location of the symlink. This behavior is similarly achieved by using the Local Selective Sync function on Insync 3 (found on the upper right of the app UI). Could you let me know if the Local Selective Sync addresses this workflow?
Hello,
Thank you for your reply. It is not quite the same, the advantage of the symlink sync is greater flexibility regarding folder and file placement. Local Selective Sync cannot quote replicate this behavior, as it syncs folders and files according to their original location.
It is usable, but it does not replicate the full functionality, especially for users that work across multiple workstations, and across different operating systems.
May I know whether the feature was abandoned due to technical reasons, or was it a design decision?
Hi. While I’m suffering this problem, the reason is due to Emacs temporary files - when a file is being modified it creates a temporary of the format
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 rnc rnc 31 Jan 19 16:03 .#test.txt -> rnc@atlantis.1857977:1610961983
What would be useful is an option to either ignore symlinks or to ignore temporary files of certain formats?
Hi @rnc,
If the file starts with a # then you can enter this on the ignore list: \#* (backslash before the # and an asterisk after). Let me know if that doesn’t work.
Oh neat ; I’d forgotten about that. I used
.\#*
which works nicely!
Thanks very much. Emacs is happy again