userfiles outside webroot folder

Hi All

CKfinder is a great software.

We wanted the userfiles folder to be outside the webroot folder. I tried searching this forum but couldn't get a definitive answer.

In config.php, we did this:
$baseUrl = '/data/';
$baseDir = '/usr/ftp/';

And then in our CKfinder webroot folder (/usr/local/www/apache22/ckfinder/), we created a symbolic (or soft) link
ln -s /usr/ftp data
So there is a soft link directory /usr/local/www/apache22/ckfinder/data pointing to /usr/ftp where we want to store the user files.

In our Apache config, we enabled the followSymLinks option.

But this does not work. Of course, we could create an alias in Apache to point /data tp /usr/ftp/ but this would defeat the purpose ( actually not sure if this will work as we haven't tried it). Is there any other way to have a userfiles folder outside the webroot folder?
Ajaxplorer is able to do this.

Thank you.

cmgui