Using Symbolic Links for Very Large Image directories I'm converting an EE site to Craft. During the conversion we are establishing LOCAL > DEV > LIVE environments and using GitHub. 


LOCAL = My local MAMP PRO setup. 
DEV & LIVE = a single account at Arcustech.
    DEV = ~/www/dev_html/public
    LIVE = ~/www/public_html/public


The site currently has 354,000 images/thumbnail files in the /images directory. We'll eventually move images/assets to S3/Cloudfront, but for now/launch we're keeping them local. 

Obviously I don't want to duplicate 354K images in the DEV directory, AND keep them sync'd, but want the DEV to correctly display images/assets for the client to see. 

So I was thinking a /images symbolic link in DEV, pointing to /images in LIVE would maintain all the correct image/asset paths and display for the DEV site and Craft configs?

Does this make sense? Am I missing something or is there a better/easier/default way to do handle large numbers of images/assets across DEV &amp; LIVE environments when they are on the same server/account?
Am I missing something or is there a better/easier/default way to do handle large numbers of images/assets across DEV &amp; LIVE environments when they are on the same server/account?


Ideally you'd move them to a cloud-based solution (S3, etc.), but locally using a symlink is a perfectly fine option, too.  Just make sure that Apache is configured to follow symlinks.

Wither either the symlink or cloud-based solution, just remember if you've got dev and live using their own databases and you perform an Asset operation on one (upload a file, delete a file, rename, etc.), then the other database will be out of sync and you'd need to run the "Update Asset Indexes" tool to pick up the change.