On: The new Dropbox

[Avery3R]

>symlinks to Windows (or at least WinXP since they didn't exist until Vista)

The version of NTFS in windows xp and the version of windows explorer both supported symlinks just fine. There was just no user-mode api to create them. You could use a kernel driver to make them, or even mount the disk offline and make them

[usaar333 → Avery3R]

Great point (found tons of resources here: http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlinkshellext/hardlinkshellext...)

Still a lot of restrictions here that would make in Dropbox's shoes circa 2008 not attempt to support them:

1. Kernel driver requirement requires admin rights which hurts installing ability

2. General instability (looks like applications might not respect symlinks right -- e.g. deletes could recursively delete contents within the symlink)

3. Won't work with users running older NTFS or FAT32 (e.g. XP upgrades) -- not sure how common that was in 2008 though.