Need to see if your shared folder is taking up space on your dropbox 👨💻? Find out how to check here.
Forum Discussion
Solved
Moving or Copying Dropbox To Another Computer
I just moved 80 Gbytes of Dropbox folders and files (not that much really) to my new computer. First I copied them to an external hard drive. Then I installed the Dropbox application on the new compu...
Hey jrlbell, there are some steps you can follow, so that the application doesn't sync your Dropbox files, but only indexes them.
This however would require to have your Dropbox files already on your new computer and not on an external drive.
These steps are:
1. Rename your existing Dropbox folder to "Dropbox (old)" or similar.
2. Install Dropbox and select the location that you want for the Dropbox folder.
3. When the installation is finished, Dropbox will immediately start to sync.
4. Pause syncing or exit Dropbox.
5. Move only the content of "Dropbox (old)" into the newly created Dropbox folder. When the move is complete, and not before, resume syncing or re-launch Dropbox.This should cause the app to index the files, instead of redownload them.
I hope this helps.
Walter
Dropbox Community Moderator
Dropbox Community Moderator
Hi Walter,
It was never stuck at the same number of files to be uploaded or synced. I had no doubt that eventually everything would get uploaded. I was just wondering why the files had to be uploaded at all since they were already in the Dropbox cloud, already on another device, and were replicated exactly in the new computer's Dropbox folder from an external hard drive. It seems to me that they should have just needed a re-indexing, not an entire upload.
Anyway, after moving all of the very large files (> 5GB) and a bunch of medium sized files (100 MB <> 4.99 GB) from the Dropbox folder on my desktop, it finally reached the up-to-date stage. However, 7 or 8 days to upload 90 GB of files is just unacceptable to me. At that rate, backing up or syncing all of my 850+ GB of data would take two or three months to get to up-to-date.
I work with some fairly large video, graphic, raw photos image, and ISO type files. One thing I noticed even prior to upgrading to this new computer is that it is next to impossible to work with large files when they are in the Dropbox folder and syncing. The second that Dropbox starts uploading (syncing) a large file, the file cannot be renamed or moved to a different folder and becomes kind of unusable in many applications because they are somehow locked by Dropbox.
I think the solution for me is to use Dropbox only for documents and smaller images (.jpg, .png, etc.) that I need to use on multiple devices and leave everything else in my desktop's non-Dropbox folders. That is the way I have operated for years, but I thought I'd would give the 2TB subscription a try. It's definitely not worth it unless you have very fast Internet upload speeds.
I still think that the Dropbox scanning feature is the best-in-breed and I like that my iPhone photos are automatically uploaded to my Camera Uploads folder so that I can readily access them on my desktop (oh yeah, I need to set that so it doesn't upload videos, i.e. large files, automatically) . I'll continue to back up my files onto external hard drives because this is by far the fastest way to backup files.
Well, that's all for now.
John
- Hannah
Hey jrlbell, thanks for the additional info and the clarifications.
Your feedback is also very valuable and I will make sure it's passed along to our team.
I'm not really clear on why you followed this process; adding files to your Dropbox folder (even if they already exist in your Dropbox account), would cause them to get uploaded again, thus the "Uploading" sync status.
In my opinion, it would have been faster to just allow the application to sync everything down, after installing the app to your new computer.
In any case, I'm glad to see that syncing is now finished and everything's gone back to normal, even if it was that slow.
And of course, your feedback will be passed along.
If you have any other questions, please let us know.
I had a fairly straight forward reason for copying the folders and files to my new computer. I actually needed to use them and I didn't want to wait 7 to 10 days (or who knows how long) for the files to download to my computer from cloud.
Now that I know how Dropbox works (or doesn't work) I will never do that again.
My question remains though: why, if the exact same files are in the cloud and on my computer in the "Dropbox" folder (after I copied the files over) does Dropbox not simply reindex the files?
- Nancy
Hi jrlbell! Hope you don’t mind me jump in.
What you mentioned in your last message sounds correct; however, please keep in mind that sometimes the status of the Dropbox app may show as “syncing”, even though it’s actually indexing your files. This may still take some time though, depending on the number and size of your files.
Like Hannah suggested, if you need to do something similar in the future, it may be better to sync the files anew to your Dropbox app as online-only, and then make available offline only the files/folders you need access to on a more regular basis.
