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cloudres's avatar
cloudres
Experienced | Level 12
7 months ago

Best way to sync the Downloads and Desktop folders across my Macs

Hi everyone, I need to keep my Downloads and Desktop folders synchronised (in addition to the Dropbox folder) across all my Macs. What’s the best way to do this using Dropbox, if it’s possible?

Thanks.

4 Replies

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

    Hey there cloudres - thanks for posting on our Community!

    Are you familiar with the Dropbox Backup feature by any chance? This would help keep those folders backed up from all of your devices, but they'd be named after your linked devices.

    If you'd like to sync them, you'd need to copy or move them into your Dropbox folder.

    I hope this helps!

  • cloudres's avatar
    cloudres
    Experienced | Level 12
    7 months ago

    I’ve never tried that feature before, but I’m not sure it’s ideal in my case after reading your comment. Perhaps I’ve just misunderstood? I need something that’s a sort of middle ground between a backup folder and a synchronised folder.

  • Hannah's avatar
    Hannah
    Icon for Dropbox Community Moderator rankDropbox Community Moderator
    7 months ago

    Hey cloudres, backing up those folders with the Backup feature would add them to your Dropbox account, without needing to manually copy them into your Dropbox folder.

    However with backup, the folders would be available on your other devices only through the backups page on dropbox.com, not locally.

    If you want the folders to be synced and available in the Dropbox folder on all connected computers, you'd need to manually sync them, by moving or copying them like Walter mentioned.

    I hope this helps.

  • cloudres's avatar
    cloudres
    Experienced | Level 12
    7 months ago

    At this point, it might as well make sense to create parallel folders within Dropbox and occasionally move the files created on the various Desktops of the different devices (in my case, there are two: a desktop Mac and a MacBook). 

    It’s a shame there isn’t a specific tool for this, though – it seems like such a simple thing…

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