Move online only files and folders within my Dropbox folder without downloading them

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pablopaul wrote:

At this present time, I can see that there is no problem moving online-only files/folders between Dropbox folders; the issue only occurs with copying online-only files/folders.

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To me, this makes sense and how I would expect it to work.

When moving a file, you're moving it as is, in its current state from one location to another. I would expect it to remain online-only provided you're moving it within your Dropbox folder. When copying a file, you're making a new copy of that file and storing it elsewhere on your computer. Whether it's in or out of Dropbox makes no matter. In order for your operating system to make a copy of a file and save it somewhere, it needs access to the entire file, so Dropbox has to downloaded it first.

For me, it's not intuitive. I would expect files that are marked as "online only" to act like pointers, like what Windows calls a shortcut and Mac calls an alias. You can copy shortcuts (or aliases) and it doesn't require all the data to be copied; it simply copies the pointer to the file location. It seems to me that once you opt to have files/folders be online-only, what you would be left with in your local Dropbox folder would be pointers to those files. What I would like to do is copy those pointers within Dropbox, rather than the files themselves. I can totally understand that if I was copying from the Dropbox folder to any folder outside of that scope it would require downloading first, as the pointers would have no meaning outside of Dropbox's purview.

I love the Dropbox online-only feature, as I have limited space on my laptop, and it's nice to download specific files when I need to work with them. But for me it's counterintuitive to choose "online only" and then not at least receive a warning before it starts downloading those files to my computer.