Setting up Skydrive to sync a folder NOT in the skydrive root

One of the features that I really liked about Windows Live Mesh was the ability to point to any folder and say, “sync this”.  Both Dropbox and Skydrive “limit” you to only syncing folders that are in their root folder.  There are ways around this and this blog post covers one of them and should equally well for both services, though I’ve not tried it with Dropbox.

I have moved away from dropbox not because it’s a bad service, but simply because I got more space for free with Skydrive *, and I already had stuff scattered across both services.  I’ve consolidated everything onto Skydrive, but will keep my dropbox account so that I can get at files that others with to share via that service (but I’ve uninstalled the client). 

Just like Dropbox, the Skydrive service creates a folder on your machine that you put directories and files into and it will automatically sync those with the Cloud.  I have some applications that store local files that I want to have available in order to sync to other machines, but these applications don’t let me choose where to store the files, or simply would be a hassle to deal with changing the default location.  For these types of files I used the mklink.exe Command Line utility to create a symbolic link between the directory where the files are stored and my Skydrive directory. 

For example, I use Windows Live Writer to write my blog posts (including this one) and this application stores copies of the local drafts and previously posted content in a local directory.  I wanted to make sure that these posts are synced to the cloud so that I could keep copies on other machines, or for “just in case” situations (though I do nightly backups of my laptop).  I ran the following from a command line prompt with admin privileges:

mklink /d "C:\Users\Michael\SkyDrive\Blog" "C:\Users\Michael\Documents\My Weblog Posts"

The “Blog” directory under the Skydrive root folder DID NOT exist, it is created as part of the mklink command’s processing.  Once this is executed you can get to the contents of the directory via either path.  As far as Skydrive is concerned this content exists under the root Skydrive folder, so it’s synced.  As far as Live Writer is concerned the content is where it has always been.

Pretty handy.  Hope this helps someone else as well, but I posted this mainly so I don’t have to scour the net trying to remember which command line utility does this in the future.

UPDATE: I have done this on Windows 8 Consumer Preview and at first it seems to work.  However, after a computer restart the Skydrive app fails when it starts up.  When I removed the link folder it then started normally.  Your mileage may vary.

UPDATE -6/3/2012: It seems that this is a problem in general and not just Windows 8.  Looks like the issue has been reported and escalated.

* I was previously a Skydrive user and when they announced their new app and upgrades a few weeks back I was able to get the free limited time 25GB limit for current users.