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
- Hannah
Dropbox Community Moderator
Hi there, user71.
The truth is that through Dropbox you could go about this with files in smaller batches, but at the moment there's no other alternative or feature like using a command-line operation.
I've passed your comments along to our team, though, and made sure your feedback went to the appropriate people.
If there's anything else we can help you with, please let us know!
