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How do I get all files and folders on Dropbox Business account
I have asked this question in the past and did get answers but I am still struggling to figure this out. Basically, I want to export the entire structure of the given Dropbox Business account to a l...
Greg-DB
Dropbox Community Moderator
Dropbox Community Moderatorlisting namespace will include all namespaces (not recursive but top-level) on both types (Team space and non-team space) of accounts?
Yes, /2/team/namespaces/list[/continue] will list all namespaces for a team, whether or not the team uses the team space configuration.
If team folders and shared folders both have a shared_folder_id and are almost similar, then why are they identified differenty.
While team folders and shared folders are similar and share some properties, there do not behave exactly the same, so they are identified differently. For instance, team folders are shared with the entire team, while shared folders can be shared with arbitrary/specific accounts.
This means if I have 5 members on Business account and I create a Team folder, then all those 5 members get access to the Team folder. There is no concept of folder permissions on team folders? What I am failing to understand is all users I create in Dropbox Business are team members and they have access to all team folders, then where does this shared folder comes from.
- Greg-DB
Team folders are for sharing content with one's team. You can find more information on team folders in the help center here.
Shared folders can be used to share folders with arbitrary users. You can find more information on shared folders in the help center here.
Whenever I think I have an idea about how I am going to get what I want, I bump into something that makes me wonder if I should really do this project.
I list namespaces and the namespace.name for team member folder is 'Root'. I list folders recursively and there are thousands of deleted files/folders that don't have 'path_display' attribute and I don't know how would I get the size of those deleted files/folders without knowing thier path or an identifier. Then there are several entries in folder list response that do not have 'path_display' attribute. All I see in those entries are ( {'name': '<item name>', 'parent_shared_folder_id': '<id>, 'id': 'id:<id>'} ). I don't know how am I supposed to construct the absolute path of such entries unless Dropbox expects us to make another request to another endpoint to get the absolute path of such entries.
I have seen poorly designed APIs, but Dropbox APIs are worst. I wonder if the developers knew what they were doing. Dropbox chose not to give an endpoint that can be queried to get the unique listing of all files/folders rather they chose to give something like impersonation where you impersonate each user or an admin and list the same folders and do the sorting yourself. No API to get the size of folder (list folders recursively and get calculate the size). The list goes on.
You guys forward feature requests but those get moved to the trash bin because Dropbox does not want to make things easy.
- Greg-DB
Thanks for the feedback! We appreciate it. I'm sharing this with the team.
Note that if a Metadata object doesn't contain `path_lower` or `path_display`, it indicates that "the file or folder is not mounted". I.e., it's in a shared folder that isn't currently added to the account, so it doesn't have a path in the account.
And it sounds like specifically, you'd like the following, so I've enumerated the following feature requests for the team:
- The ability to easily get the total size for a folder's contents
- The ability to get the size for a deleted file
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