New named Dropbox structure

We onboarded Dropbox 5y ago because of unlimited storage and versioning and because of ease of use.

• The change from unlimited versioning to only a year was the first annoyance. This made us buy NAS with Snapshot capability to comply with our retention policy
• Despite 10Gbit Uplink, performance was never great
• "Billing" external users for storage that you share with them just so that they have to buy a subscription is shady. You already calculated the files against my storage, no need to count it twice. 
• Support was always friendly but helpless. Poor support crew has to clean up the mess of management.

But I could overlook all these problems because Dropbox was easy to use and maintain. We liked Dropbox because it made IT life easy. Unfortunately, you guys messed up that part so bad, that it is now easier for us to self-host Nextcloud with S3 Backup. I know this is not the case for businesses without IT, but that this is true for us should really make you rethink your current ways of doing. 

Bye Dropbox. You forgot why people originally liked you. We don't need another password manager, pages, signature, video replay, or any of that. 

Ongoing saga of this DropBox nightmare.  Seriously, this is really pushing me towards Google Drive (which we already have) and/or Box.com.  Maybe even Microsoft's OneDrive.

Tried to do some basic work—autogenerate a templated file, move it into a new matter's folder.

AH, but the project management system is no longer linked to DropBox.  Okay, though, Zapier is . . . 

BUT, now Zapier is not linked to the Team Folder and is creating a new folder structure based on the Project Management / Client / Matter structure in my personal folder.

Okay, so maybe I just go ahead and migrate and all my literally thousands of files from the Team Folder that got moved out and into a fully-shared folder in my personal folder.

I mean, we made Groups in DropBox for this, including the automatically-created Everyone group.

Ah, but you can only add auto-generated groups to TEAM FOLDERS!!!!!   GLDMWFMNL:SDNF:KAJNFAD:KLFJAS:KFADJN:FKDSNJFDS:KLDFJ

You have got to be kidding me.  So now I am creating an EVERYONE group that is not the EVERYONE group . . . 

I hate DropBox so much.  It is like they are trying to make me work to migrate away from them.

Remember when DropBox was file-syncing and file-sharing?  Remember when it was the simple solution anyone could use?  Remember when it was the best, simplest, easy-to-use option for that?

Ah, yes, I remember those days . . . now there's Paper and whatever nonsense they have now.

Could be worse—have a matter involving a large company that shared a large set of files using a janky-90s-era solution.

Still, this is becoming unbearable, and I am afraid when I have the time (because owner, CTO, CLO, CEO, all the **bleep** hats guy) we will be migrating.

Which is a bloody shame.  DropBox was literally the first company software tool we purchased (back before DropBox for business; paid for the professional personal DropBox . . . ah, the days).

Hey Megan, any update on this?

Sorry to pressure you, but we need a solution to this problem.

Because I don't know if all the changes are synced to the cloud, I will probably buy and install another HDD, uninstall Dropbox, reinstall Dropbox to this new HDD, copy all files over from the old destination to get all the changes. Despite the 10Gbit Fiber connection, that will probably take days to resync.

I really hope you guys can come up with a solution!

Hi Megan

Thank you for you response. 

Here is a picture of the momentary status.

It grew from original 300MB (3 days) to that number and it has been that way since 5 days.

The project is not a single project, but a folder called project that contains all our projects 🙂

So in the web view, cloud and on all other clients that finished syncing, this is the project folder path:

\acme Dropbox\project 

the original path was:

\Dropbox (acme)\project

and that is where the project folder still is on the broken client. So basically, I has not been moved yet.

The size is indeed quiet big, around 4TB. 

Version: 159.4.5870

I hesitate to just reinstall Dropbox, because there have been a lot of changes and I don't know how Dropbox would handle it that there are newer files in \Dropbox (acme)\project while that path does not exist anymore in the cloud.

Hi ComputerGoesBeeeeeep, sorry to hear about this, let me help! 

Can you send me a screenshot of the app's syncing status, along with its version? Also, how long has it been like that, and what is the size of the project? 

Let me know more! 

The latest business team changes have broken my sync.

The new naming system moved folders around. 

I don't know why Dropbox had to do this and I don't know why I could not suspend this "upgrade" but here we are. Some API integrations also failed because of this.

Little bit annoyed already, I noticed that one client still has not moved the folder project (which is pretty big) to its new destination and the sync is stuck at 300 files and 2 days remaining. 

Reboot and restart of Dropbox did not help. 

What would be your recommendation to solve this? I hope to avoid uninstall Dropbox completely, but fail to see another way atm. 

And please Dropbox, do not make unnecessary and (with only 30 days notice!) mandatory changes in the future. Especially when your desktop sync software is not robust enough to handle it. I know it isn't great to ask for help and at the same time speak badly about the product, but I don't know where else I could voice that criticism.  

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Structuraldood wrote:

Is there truly no method to opt out of this change in naming convention?

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You can try contacting support and see if it's an option, but it's been my understanding that while you can postpone the upgrade, there's no way to opt out of it permanently.

• https://help.dropbox.com/plans/upcoming-business-team-changes

My company received the recent announcement about "Upcoming changes to your Dropbox team account".  Quite frankly, it has me terrified, starting with the very first bullet item related to naming convention.  This is going to cause major problems within our organization, and I can't believe we're alone.

We have thousands of files that are linked to our DB repository.  Revising all of those links throughout our products and documentation is not an option.  I'm being told by our management to find an option within DB, or they will be moving away from DB.  It's that much of a hardship on us.

Is there truly no method to opt out of this change in naming convention?  We cannot let this happen.

Thanks in advance for any thoughts anyone can share.

This is exactly our setup. In a customer perspective, a totally unneeded change.

As a semi-workaround if you have a few key folders you use all the time, you can right click and add them to 'Quick Access' so they show in that section at the top of your windows explorer side bar.