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How safe is it to move my Dropbox folder to an external HDD drive?
Hi everyone, I am a video editor working with large RAW footage files through Dropbox and I'm trying to optimize my storage setup after adding a new drive.
My setup is a newly purchased 10TB External HDD and a 2TB external SSD. The Dropbox folder is currently on the SSD because when I frist set everything up, the SSD was my only external drive.
Now that I have the 10 TB drive, I am considering moving the main Dropbox folder there to free up space on the SSD.
My proposed workflow is to move the dropbox folder to the 10TB HDD and let all synced files live there. When starting a project, I would manually copy the specific folder from the HDD to the SSD and edit directly from the SSD for performance. After finishing, I would move everything back to the HDD inside the dropbox folder for syncing.
My questions are:
Will it work?
Is this a stable and safe setup long term?
Are there risks if the external HDD disconnects while Dropbox is running?
Does anyone here use a similar HDD and SSD setup for video editing?
I am trying to balance performance and storage efficiency without creating sync conflicts or data loss risk. I appreciate any advice from people who have experience managing large media files with Dropbox. Thanks.
2 Replies
- Nancy
Dropbox Community Moderator
Hey Henryrchrd, welcome back to our forum!
The setup that you’re suggesting could indeed work.
However, even though I’m not personally using the same setup, I’d advise you to always make sure that your HDD is connected to your computer before you turn it on and that you don’t disconnect the drive while Dropbox is running.
If Dropbox is unable to detect the local Dropbox folder at any given time, it may perceive this as an act of deletion and it’ll proceed to also delete your files from your Dropbox account online (which also sync these updates to any other devices you may have linked to Dropbox).
Let me know, if you have any other questions.
Okay, thanks for the reply. So to make sure, it is fine to copy from the dropbox folder from the HDD to the SSD (even when Dropbox is running), but just make sure not to cut/delete it right?
Also, do I need to make the files available offline before copying?
And can I ask what is your setup so maybe I can learn from yours.
