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how do I eject my external hard drive without deleting everything
I recently synced my dropbox to my external hard drive. However, I have heard that if you remove your external hard drive from your macbook then everything on your dopbox will be deleted. How do I eject my external hard drive without deleting everything? is that possible? if its not possible, then how do I just remove dropbox from my hard drive without deleting everything?
Thanks for the info. If the Dropbox folder is on the external drive, then you need to ensure that you fully quit the Dropbox desktop application from your machine prior to removing the drive to prevent any deletions.
Likewise, when you next want to run the app, make sure the drive is connected and mounted under the same drive or name to prevent deletions.
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Hey Jay!
I believe my dropbox folder is on my hard drive. I just recently downloaded dropbox and when it asked which folder to sync to I chose my external hard drive.
- Jay
Dropbox Community Moderator
Thanks for the info. If the Dropbox folder is on the external drive, then you need to ensure that you fully quit the Dropbox desktop application from your machine prior to removing the drive to prevent any deletions.
Likewise, when you next want to run the app, make sure the drive is connected and mounted under the same drive or name to prevent deletions.
Thank you so much! I was also wondering, on the off-chance that I want to remove my hard drive halfway through syncing everything, how would I go about that? Is there a way to cancel the sync process without deleting anything?
- Walter
Hey carlosr27 - sorry to jump in here.
I just wanted to mention that there's no way to cancel syncing, but you can pause it following these steps or move the files that are syncing out of your Dropbox folder and let the app sync your changes till it's up to date.
Let us know if you have any other questions.
- Thank you so much for your response Walter! I was just wondering because my hard drive doesn’t have enough space compared to how big my Dropbox is. I’ll probably get an error saying that the hard drive is full so is there anything I can do to prevent this? If I eject the hard drive now will it erase my Dropbox?
- Walter
You can use selective sync to remove some folders from your hard drive as this would help free up some space, if needed carlosr27
And yes, if you eject your hard drive while the desktop app is syncing, this will probably lead to some data loss, so I'd advise against it.
Thank you again Walter! I will try that. Only issue is that my dropbox is 36TB and my hard drive is 12TB so it will probably take a very long time to do that. If there is anything else I can do, please let me know!
Hi! So I accidentally began syncing my entire dropbox to my hard drive. My dropbox is using 40TB and my hard drive only has 12TB. How do I stop the syncing without deleting everything from Dropbox that I downloaded? I've paused it at 500GB. Also for context, this is not a back-up.
- Nancy
Hi Carlos! Sorry to jump in here.
Did you follow these steps to move your Dropbox folder from your external drive to your internal drive?
Are you able to open your app preferences, and try Walter’s suggestion above about selective sync?
