Forum Discussion

Supermac's avatar
Supermac
Explorer | Level 3
5 years ago

Path error in Dropbox after User Home name changed..

Specifically Dropbox 112.4.321 on MacOS 10.12.6. Background: A restore from backup (TimeMachine) after a failed hard drive resulted in a number 1 being appended to the User Name. Most things did n...
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Здравко's avatar
Здравко
Legendary | Level 20
5 years ago

Hi Supermac,

You can forcibly unlink your application from the account using following command:

rm -rf ~/.dropbox

After that, run the application and link back to your account as usual.

Hope this helps.

  • Supermac's avatar
    Supermac
    Explorer | Level 3
    5 years ago

    Hi Здравко 

    What a wonderful solution. I thought it should be relatively straight-forward. Thank you kindly.

    I cannot verify if that worked as I fixed it the "long way round", as follows;

     - logged in as root

     - created a folder in Users with the name that Dropbox was seeking

     - copied my existing Dropbox into it

     - changed the pseudo-User folder to Read/Write for all Admins

     - logged in as normal User name. Dropbox app now discovered and could access the file it was expecting.

    The Dropbox app went through the whole Setup process which allowed me to delete devices (it had three copies of the same computer - possibly from three different HDD replacements (or SDD the last one). I could also delete instances of Safari that were supposedly logged in from 3 years ago! Part of the setup allowed me to choose "Other…" as a location for the Dropbox folder and I chose the expected instance in my own User folder.

     

    After a few minutes Syncing - all was well, and I believe it is functional now.

     

    ENHANCEMENT SUGGESTION

    I recommend that Dropbox allows the app to go into setup mode and reselect the Destination or instance of Dropbox to connect to, when it has an error like I described.

     

    Once again, thank you for looking at my problem and providing a succinct answer.

  • susanart's avatar
    susanart
    New member | Level 2
    5 years ago

    Perfect! That took about 5 seconds! Thanks, although you should probably mention that this has to be done in the Terminal app.

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