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Forum Discussion
Vincent M.9
11 years agoNew member | Level 1
Can you remove the space in the dropbox folder name ("Dropbox (Company-Name)")?
I'm using my companies business dropbox account. And it created a folder called "Dropbox (my companies name here)".
Is there a way to remove the space between "Dropbox" and "("? I don't want to ha...
- 9 years ago
Hi all,
Unfortunately, it's not possible to change the name of Dropbox folder, as many of you have discovered.
If you are using it for scripts then the best thing would firstly to parse the info.json and grab the path from there. The JSON is located:
Mac/Linux:
~/.dropbox/info.json
Windows will be one of these two paths:
%APPDATA%\Dropbox\info.json
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Dropbox\info.json
I say this as if you were to move your Dropbox folder at anytime then this would, of course, break any paths that explicitly referenced an exact folder path.
On a side note, spaces within file paths shouldn't cause issues within scripts, it's fairly normal to have some spaces in there, just ensure your path string is correctly formatted and your script should be fine.
XionicFire
4 years agoCollaborator | Level 9
Ditto on the "Paper"
We use Dropbox as a basically backbone of the business, nothing gets done in this company if its not, automatically and transparently for the user, uploaded to Dropbox, most of our users don't even know what the icon is or what it does, its mandatory install on every one of our company machines, because it lets us, the sysadmins of the world (you know the guys who actually keep stuff working for everyone else every day), revert "user stupidity" errors like "whoops! I'm sorry I deleted the entire accounting folder, my bad! can you fix it?" and other such nightmares with a single click and in a few minutes, which at least for me, and our company, is basically a showstopper not to have.
I do not want my users messing with the Dropbox software or its settings, I do not want them to even know its there, so features like "Paper" don't help, not to mention they just don't work, when people have tried them they just inundate our support call center with stupid calls about why such and such new Dropbox "feature" is not working, I thank Dropbox they have now given us the option to turn off all this nonsense to our users, if I wanted something like "paper" id just upgrade our already existing office 365 subscriptions and use Office Online + OneDrive, which, you know... actually works....
Dear Dropbox, we all know you want to compete with Office and OneDrive, don't.. you are not OneDrive, you are BETTER than OneDrive, OneDrive is a stupid users dream come true but the IT departments nightmare, Dropbox had been and for the most part (with some hacks and tweaks) a "no nonsense" transparent sync and backup solution that works well over the entire company.
Please stay that, do not try to be OneDrive, we have OneDrive, we hate it, we only turn it on for a user if its absolutely necessary because of all the nightmares it causes, whereas Dropbox is mandatory install on every PC and every user in the company no exceptions.
I will say it again, YOU ARE NOT ONEDRIVE, if you insist on going the OneDrive route because some marketer up top tells you that's where the money is I'm going to let you in on a little secret those guys don't know/don't get, if you turn into OneDrive, we will just bite the bullet and switch to OneDrive, we hate it, its absolute garbage, but if were forced to pick some third party OneDrive wannabe over REAL OneDrive with the Active directory and Azure Domain security that actually works, we will pick that, we will grumble, complain and moan every day for the entire 3 months it will take to migrate everything to Microsoft and never look back, because OneDrive works, its just absolute crap, Its 10x more work for us to do the same thing than Dropbox does, but it works, not to mention Microsoft uses the same servers for all its services, so we cannot separate OneDrive traffic from, you know.. teams video conferencing, which breaks everything, and Microsoft has no interest in fixing it, with Dropbox we can route Dropbox heavy traffic out one internet WAN, and the video chat on another, preserving quality of service for our users, but that is a story for another time....
So please, we know you think its a good idea to turn into your competitors, but in this case its not, just do what you are the king at, transparent, seamless, awesome, invisible, automation friendly, no one knows its there but the sysadmin, sync and backup solution for our entire company, and we will be here forever.
I swear some of our users just think the "Share" button on their files is part of the operating system in the computer, they have never understood how or why it works, keep it that way!
I hope this has helped explain why were frustrated with all your changes and why you don't seem to understand why we don't want "new cool features!"
PS. IMHO you should just make 2 versions of Dropbox, your "OneDrive" style one, which, by all means have fun with it and sell it to whom ever will buy it, and a "Engineering IT" version, which lets us change and tweak everything as we need it, it doesn't have any of the "cool features" the cool kids want but will do the job we need it to do, you do that, I can guarantee you we will never go anywhere and we will even make it mandatory to have this Dropbox on all machines, even kiosks.
This way, If users want to have their OneDrive, let them, but I will sleep easy knowing when they screw up, and they will, I can troubleshoot and fix the problem from my house with my family in 5 minutes on a Saturday night, making management love me and all my IT team forever, while the poor SOB we assign to the OneDrive tech support will be slaving away at the office until 4am trying to figure out why nothing is working and get yelled at on Monday after 2 days of not sleeping on how everything is wrong and the documents are not the ones that were there.
This is Just a recommendation, We've all done the OneDrive 4am thing, were not to keen on going back to that, ever, and since its our signatures that select and ensure Dropbox is kept as a provider, and paid on time, you should probably take our voice a little more into consideration than our "users", sure they use the thing, and are super vocal about it, but if the thing does not work, its our heads that roll not theirs, so until that changes, we will still pick what ever we think does the job best, and at the moment, that is Dropbox.
insolace
4 years agoNew member | Level 2
GAH!
Dropbox has now implemented member folders ("Firstname Lastname") for dropbox for business, which CANNOT be renamed. This means the workaround (quitting dropbox, renaming the folder, creating an alias with the space in the name) no longer works.
Dropbox - this breaks so much software that cannot handle spaces in filenames, please give us the option to disable spaces (replace with underscores!). This is a real show stopper.
- bill-12344 years agoHelpful | Level 6
Dropbox has by now proven that they no longer care about the file synchronizing product. They don't care if it continues to work, they don't care if it is suitable for any particular use case. In particular, they don't care if Dropbox works for anything other than low-skill point-and-click. It is not a professional tool.
- cjrhoads4 years agoHelpful | Level 6
I agree, bill-1234
Dropbox has now implemented SO MANY features that "break" existing applications and confuse people to no end that I wonder if they truly understand why people use Dropbox.
If I wanted to use GoogleDrive with all its inherent limitations, I wouldn't be using Dropbox.
-I don't want an "app" that opens all of my files in an application that I don't want or need.
-I don't want to be able to watch as someone edits the files that we share.
Dropbox was previously the "dream" cloud storage. It automatically synched files on the back end, did not force you to use cloud space unnecessarily, and left all of your files in their native format.
But NO MORE. Now it opens files in that dreaded dropbox application (Paper or something like that), asks you EVERY TIME to put your photos on the dropbox (which would cause me to pay much more for storage because I have a TON of photos), and is very confusing about which interface is being used (the cloud interface or the local File Explorer interface).
Of course, the personal Dropbox is still better than either Google Drive or OneDrive or iCloud.
But the BUSINESS version of Dropbox - well, I gave up on that when they wouldn't let me eliminate the space. After trying to use it for more than a month I converted all my stuff back to the personal version. (And I needed technical support for that, so kudos to the technical support team at Dropbox for being willing to help me out.)
So that's what I suggest you do. I've found that the Business version of Dropbox doesn't give you anything that the personal version doesn't. I still have teams and share my folders with teams. I just have to manage each shared folder individually instead of having an over-bloated application to manage the teams.
- themaybeblock4 years agoCollaborator | Level 8
What I want to know is what developer thought putting spaces in base directory paths was a smart thing from the very beginning? When I had to join a Dropbox team, it wound up breaking hundreds of links throughout hundreds of After Effects projects in my personal folder. They had to know how this deeply flawed approach could break links all over the place, honestly the incompetence is mind-boggling.
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