I have relocated my htdocs folder to be within my dropbox folder and would like to do a similar thing with my MySQL databases. I don't know if this is even possible or advisable so would love to hear anyones advice and thoughts.
Should I be doing this and if so how?
I would discourage it deeply :)
But... you can change you're path to whatever you want...
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/server-options.html#option_mysqld_datadir
You can simply add the flag each time you start mysqld, or you could add it to the [mysqld] section of your user-wide/machine-wide mysql config file.
You will need to initialize the tables first, using the mysql_install_db script ( http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/mysql-install-db.html )