Uninstalling Dropbox and Maintaining Links?

I find myself in the situation where I should uninstall Dropbox.

As you might know, this involves deleting a bunch of files and downloading them back after the re-installation.

My question is: Is there a way to restore Hook.app links to deleted files, pointing to the new ones?

This is a normal scenario. Hook is designed to heuristically deal with shared folders, version control system repositories’ folders, disk images, file systems, network drives, volumes etc. that come, go and come back. (A related feature allows hook://file/ URLs to be shared between users.) The simplest thing to do is simply let Hook do its thing with no special precautions. However, when these files suddenly disappear, Hook might try to re-attach the links to similar files (chiefly same filename) later using Spotlight to find files. If you have a bunch of similar files that you don’t want Hook to reattach your hooks to (e.g., in an attached backup of your Dropbox folders), you can exclude that backup from Spotlight till you re-attach the Dropbox folder.

If Hook inadvertently re-attaches some hooks to other files you can find them through Hook’s search once you remount the Dropbox share. If that kind of thing happens, there’s Copy Link and Hook to Copied Links (plural). If you absolutely want to prevent Hook from reattaching those hooks to your duplicates, you can quit Hook during the down time.

That’s great to hear!

Bare with me, I just came off of a night shit. The explanation confused me a bit. So I have more questions.

I have one scenario in which I fear hook might get confused. I keep a copy of my “core” and sensitive documents folder backed up on iCloud from Dropbox.

This happens via Hazel, which performs a Sync action from Dropbox to iCloud.

Would keeping that double backup folder on my machine potentially confuse Hook during the process?

Per the tip above, if you would like to ensure that Hook doesn’t re-anchor those links to files in your backup folder it’s best to exclude the backup folder from Spotlight at least during the process. Or you could quit Hook during the process as it will not index behind the scenes. Another approach is to do a backup of Hook before the process and if it has done the reattachment you don’t like, then recover from backup per the instruction. We will likely provide an “exclude from Hook” configuration later, so as to decouple the two.