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Forum Discussion

SamJaques's avatar
SamJaques
New member | Level 2
6 months ago

Can I sync a single folder with selective sync, without downloading its entire directory?

Suppose I have a folder structure as follows: Folder A contains File A and Folder B. Folder B contains File B. Something like: Folder A |- File A |- Folder B    |- File B The ...
desktop
Linux
sync
Rich's avatar
Rich
Icon for Super User II rankSuper User II
6 months ago
SamJaques wrote:

The expected behaviour is that if I choose "Selective Sync" and click only "Folder B", this should locally sync Folder B and File B, but not File A.

That is not the expected behavior. The expected behavior is that selecting Folder B will also cause any files at the same level to sync as well. It's working as designed.

SamJaques's avatar
SamJaques
New member | Level 2
6 months ago

If I wanted the files in Folder A to be synced, I would select folder A. Maybe a better way than phrasing it in terms of "expected behaviour" is that if I want to sync Folder B but no other item in Folder A, nothing allows me to do that. If Folder A only contains folders, this is possible (I uncheck selective sync on every folder except B), but not if Folder A has "loose" files.

You might ask: why not just create a folder in Folder A for "not B", and then uncheck that folder? Dropbox for web times out or crashes when I try to do operations with a large number of files, and this naturally occurs when using it for photo uploads. Maybe Dropbox for desktop can do this, but I don't have enough disk space to download the folder to do this operation (hence the question!). 

Eventually I solved my actual issue by asking Dropbox to auto-sort the photos (which took two tries, again because the web interface is not reliable!) but I still think selective sync should be more expressive.

  • Nancy's avatar
    Nancy
    Icon for Dropbox Community Moderator rankDropbox Community Moderator
    6 months ago

    Hey SamJaques, hope it’s OK if I jump in. About the issue you mention with the Dropbox website, can you let me know a few more details perhaps (just in case you want us to look into it further)? 

    For example, how many files are you working with when the Dropbox website crashes? Is the behavior consistent across different browsers?

    • Walter's avatar
      Walter
      Icon for Dropbox Community Moderator rankDropbox Community Moderator
      5 months ago

      Hi SamJaques - I'm just circling back to see if you saw our last reply.

      In case you still need any help feel free to reach out with the information we requested and we'll take it from there. If your issue has been solved, let us know what worked for you!

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