Merging Folder Contents Within the Same Dropbox Account

Hi there pesas, thanks for reaching out to us here!

 

To merge the contents of your folders, it wouldn't be something that you can do automatically through Dropbox I'm afraid.

 

This is something that you could do perhaps on a connected computer, as your OS should have the function to detect if files are the same and give you the options to replace, make a copy of or not move duplicate files.

 

Another suggestion would be to have a look for some third party apps that could help achieve this automatically for you, instead of having to do it manually. You can do this with a quick web search.

 

Sorry that I can't be of much help with this, but please do let me know if you have any questions.

 

Thanks!

Thanks for getting back to me here pesas!

 

If there's anything else that I can help with, don't hesitate to give me a nudge here. :grin:

 

Hope you have a great rest of your week Gary!

I realize this thread hasn’t been active in a year and a half, but I want to bring this back up. I have Dropbox as the primary storage for all of my files, which total about 1.5 TB. My reason for doing that is both my wife and I use iPhones or iPads for about 99% of our computing needs using a wide range of apps which interoperate with Dropbox. I do have Dropbox syncing to 1 Windows laptop which, in turn, backs these file up to external drives; all of this for backup purposes. It is not uncommon that I come across multiple folder that should be merged. These folders may or may not contain files with the same names. Today, if I attempt, from the mobile app, to move these files from one folder to another, the move operation fails with a nebulous error message and doesn’t move ANYTHING if there are any files with duplicate names. To accomplish the merge I have to resort to a very tedious and laborious process of identifying the files having duplicate names and select those that don’t one-by-one to move. Dropbox IS a file manager, at its heart, that happens to use cloud storage as it’s primary storage platform. Merging file folders, including properly handling duplicate-named files with user prompts and allowing the user have their response apply to all such files, is functionality that’s been in place with other file managers for decades. This functionality should have been built into Dropbox very early in its lifecycle. Users should not have to resort to third party file management apps nor to using desktop computing platform file management apps such as MacOS Finder and Windows File Explorer to accomplish such basic functions. That’s an untenable and inexcusable answer and strategy. That this has not been prioritized as a critical need ahead of limited-usage new functionality reflects a Development and Management team that don’t use their own product and have little understanding of theme needs of their customer base. This needs to be addressed ASAP.