Control Dropbox Sync

 At the present time Dropbox does not have batch control commands to Pause and Restart sync so it does not influence other work. What would the effect be of using batch to change the name of a Dropbox folder to another empty folder so that temporarily there is nothing to sync. Would Dropbox then erase all of its existing synced files? Would it get confused and crash?

 

Something like following with C:\Users\<name>\DBx existing and empty or use Robocopy to move all contents to a temp location:

 

REN C:\Users\<name>\Dropbox  DB

REN C:\Users\<name>\DBx  Dropbox    

   <other batch commands>

REN C:\Users\<name>\Dropbox  DBx

REN C:\Users\<name>\DB  Dropbox    

 

Similar but maybe less disruptive is to have two sub folders within the Dropbox folder one Primary and one Empty and remove the primary so one is only syncing the empty one:

 

- F: is any temporary location:

 ROBOCOPY /E /MOVE C:\Users\<name>\Dropbox\Primary F:\Primary

   <other batch commands>

 ROBOCOPY /E /MOVE F:\Primary C:\Users\<name>\Dropbox\Primary

 

I do not have a test Windows PC to try either approach but any comments or perhaps someone can test and report back.