Need to see if your shared folder is taking up space on your dropbox 👨💻? Find out how to check here.
Forum Discussion
Automation won't apply to existing files. How can I achieve that?
I have a directory with a very large number of files (several thousand) that I only access online. All of the files have names based on their date of creation (eg 2025-07-01-7:00.txt). I would like to organize these into subdirectories based on their date.
From the dropbox website, I added an automation to sort these files into subfolders based on the month of file creation. I clicked on "Apply to existing files" when creating the automation. However, once the process starts, I get a Notification:
"Automation will apply to new files added to (Folder), but not to existing files"
Why isn't it applying the automation to existing files? How can I organize the existing files? There are too many files to do this by manually clicking boxes.
Thanks.
11 Replies
- Mark
Super User II
Are you folder owner, or, is it a Shared/Team one?
https://help.dropbox.com/organize/dropbox-automations#How-to-add-automation-to-an-existing-folder
I am the owner and only user of this folder.
- Megan
Dropbox Community Moderator
I followed the steps:
When I add the automation, I click on "Apply to existing files".
Then, a notification appears on my homepage under the notifications bell saying "Automation will apply to new files ... but not to existing files".
I took some screenshots, but when I drag an drop them onto this box, I get "File not allowed". Also, there is no option to attach a file at the bottom of this box.
If you can link this help query to my dropbox account, the folder is an App folder called "Audio2024".
Thanks.
Yes. When I drag a JPG to the message box it says "File not allowed." I'm using firefox on arch linux.
It turns out that the problem with attaching the screenshot files was that they were too large. I have reduced their size and attach them here.
- Jay
As you mentioned you have several thousand files, are there over 5000 files in the folder you're trying to automate?
If you click the i icon there next to 'Apply to existing files', it would mention the file limit.
Ok thanks, it might be helpful to have this pointed out in the notification, or not permit the automation if it is not going to work.
If Dropbox won't provide this automation, is there some other way to organize online files in bulk? For example, equivalents to command-line operations like
mkdir July
mv 2025-07*.wav July
Thanks
