Moving or Copying Dropbox To Another Computer

Hi jrlbell, thanks for bringing this to our attention.

Have you amended the bandwidth settings on the Dropbox desktop application for the files to upload or sync faster?

Did the Dropbox desktop application state that the files are syncing, or indexing, when you click the icon in the system tray/menu bar?

This will help me to assist further!

Hi Jay,

Yes, about three days into the upload I went through the settings and realized that the Bandwidth for uploads was limited, so I changed that to unlimited.

The Dropbox app (hovering over taskbar icon) indicates (and indicated) "Uploading". When I click on the taskbar icon at the bottom of the window it simply says "synching." I'm down to 38 files left after more than a week (I believe it was a total of 48k files or 90 GB) to start. However, I can't say that the 38 files left aren't ones I've created since starting this whole thing. 

I do know what it looks like when Dropbox is simply indexing because I kept the dropbox on the old computer but moved the files (using the built-in move function) to a different drive. The indexing takes a infinitesimal fraction of the time.

Thanks for looking into this. It will help when I transfer files to another computer.

Hey  jrlbell, sorry to jump in, but could you clarify if syncing is still stuck at the same number of files or if the desktop app is 'up to date' now?

If so, a screenshot of the app's exact status and version as shown in your taskbar would be much appreciated. 

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

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?

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.

I guess I'm still looking for an answer to my original question which was, in a nutshell, how to move the Dropbox files and folders to the Dropbox folder on  a new computer quickly, via external hard drive or a network share, without them being uploaded all over again?  If this cannot be done, then maybe someone could confirm that it is not possible.

JB

Hi Hannah,

Please note that my Dropbox on my new computer was not downloading files, it was uploading files.

What you outline is essentially what I did. I copied the files from my old computer to my new computer to a folder named, oh I don't remember, but let's say DB (it wasn't named Dropbox). I don't think it matters how they got there. They are obviously going to get there somehow, so in my case, I used an external hard drive to transfer the files. I had installed Dropbox previous to this transfer, so I paused Dropbox synchronization. I then copied the files from the DB folder on my new computer to the Dropbox folder on my new computer and resumed synchronization. Dropbox proceeded to upload every file. Not only that, but on my old computer, the files were downloading, even though they already existed, probably because my old computer thought the new computer was uploading new files and folders.

I don't know what to say except that Dropbox seems flawed in this respect.

So, I think you could just lock this thread here, because the files are all in sync now.

I'm still using Dropbox for "essential" files, but I've returned to keeping the majority of my files in non-Dropbox folders and backing up my data to an external hard drive. I'll probably keep paying for the 2Tb yearly subscription because that's the only way I can have Dropbox on more than, I think, three devices.

JB