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Forum Discussion
Move online only files and folders within my Dropbox folder without downloading them
I would like to understand why, when moving or copying "online only" files and folders between folders in my Dropbox account, that it must download them to my computer first. Using the Dropbox deskto...
Rich
Super User II
Super User II
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.
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.
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