I use folder aliases for my Dropbox and OneDrive folders on two different computers. These virtual drives are located in different paths on each computer, but I use the same DOpus config on both computers.
Regardless of the actual path, DOpus will locate these properly, with the path listed in the "alias" settings on each computer reflecting the true path. If you move the location of the cloud storage drive, the folder path will update accordingly.
Recently I started using Nextcloud, and while the "virtual drive" is implemented in much the same way (from the user's perspective, the path entered in the alias settings is an absolute path, and doesn't work when I restore the DOpus config to another computer.
Below are screenshots of what this looks like in DOpus and Explorer. They appear to be handled in the same way. But they don't behave in the same way.
How do I get the alias for the Nextcloud virtual drive path to reflect the computer's path in the same way that Dropbox and OneDrive do?
I guess the question is why doesn't DOpus update the path on different computers based on the actual path in the way that is does for OneDrive and Google Drive? I get that those are built in, but isn't the infrastructure in Windows the same? That is, in Windows those two, along with NextCloud, are accessible via the "virtual drive" visible in Explorer and Dopus. Under the hood, Windows stores and associates the actual path, and this may differ by computer.
On my two computers, DOpus will track those changes for OneDrive and Google Drive because Windows does. But Windows also appears to do the same under-the-hood tracking for NextCloud (the actual folder path represented in the screenshots above differ between computers, as they do for OneDrive and Google Drive). But in this case DOpus doesn't track the change.
Because it's a path alias you have defined yourself, not a built-in one which Opus generates.
Opus has no way to know that you want that alias to point to different folders on different computers, nor where the folders would be on each computer.
It's not something Windows does. Support for automatically locating the OneDrive and DropBox folders is something we wrote into the program, since those are both very popular.
We don't have built-in support for locating NextCloud's folder.
ok, so it's not actually just piggybacking on Windows' own auto locating. Well, not the answer I was hoping for but it's an answer! I'll look into some sort of conditional script to make it work on both. thanks!
One solution is a startup script that checks the computer name and creates/replaces the alias with the appropriate path. Lxp posted an example script here.
I think you can also use environment variables in aliases (or for the full path, for that matter, without involving aliases at all, if it's easier), which is another way to get a per-machine path.
