Forum Discussion

vinceskahan's avatar
vinceskahan
New member | Level 1
12 months ago
Solved

How to sync my files locally on my Mac, after they've been syncing as online-only?

I have a m1 mac and longstanding free dropbox account and noticed almost all my local files were gone.  It looks to me like some update to the desktop app seemingly turned on selective sync (ugh) and...
desktop
Mac
sync
  • vinceskahan's avatar
    vinceskahan
    12 months ago

    ok - lets call it resolved.  For others who search for the right buzzwords, the way to sync 'from' dropbox back 'to' the local disk is to open your dropbox folder in Finder on the mac, then right click (or trackpad equivalent) and select "make available offline" and dropbox will pull the data back into your local disk dropbox folder.

vinceskahan's avatar
vinceskahan
New member | Level 1
12 months ago

Make available offline 'does' work, but there is no way I'm going to hunt and pick through many hundreds of folders and files and do this one-by-one....that would be ridiculous.

(update - it 'does' appear I can right click on a folder and get the contents to download.  Is that the expected method that you haven't documented anywhere ?)

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

You could try selecting the whole Dropbox folder and set it to be available offline vinceskahan 

And from there, you can also adjust your syncing settings through the app's preferences. 

Let us know if anything else comes up!

About Create, upload, and share

Find help to solve issues with creating, uploading, and sharing files and folders in Dropbox. Get support and advice from the Dropbox Community.

The Dropbox Community team is active from Monday to Friday. We try to respond to you as soon as we can, usually within 2 hours.

If you need more help you can view your support options (expected response time for an email or ticket is 24 hours), or contact us on X, Facebook or Instagram.

For more info on available support options for your Dropbox plan, see this article.

If you found the answer to your question in this Community thread, please 'like' the post to say thanks and to let us know it was useful!