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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.
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 will also sync these updates to any other devices you may have linked to Dropbox).
Let me know, if you have any other questions.
10 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 will 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.- Nancy
No problem at all! Yes, that is correct; the most important thing is to make sure that the connection with your HDD drive isn’t interrupted while the Dropbox app is running on your device. Other than that, you can copy files from one drive to another.
Now, as for the syncing status of your files, I’d also suggest making the file(s) you want to work on available offline first (so that you have the full version of the file(s) on your computer, and not the placeholder(s).
After they've been fully downloaded on your device, you can copy them over to your other drive and edit them. When you’re done with the updates, you can move them back to your Dropbox folder and make them online-only again, if you want to save up space.
Unfortunately, I don't have my local Dropbox folder saved on an external drive at the moment, so that I can provide more insight on this. I can leave this thread open for now, though (we may have other users that have a similar setup to yours, so they may want to share their tips here, as well).
Alright thank you so much Nancy!
Sorry I'm very new to Dropbox and got stuck indexing forever on my 1st day 😅
So I don't want to make the same mistake again.- Nancy
No worries! I totally understand how you feel.
If you need something else, I’ll be right here! ☺️
Hi, I forgot to ask another question. So if I'm done with the folder in my SSD, I would copy it again to the HDD right. There will be new files in the folder from the SSD (exported videos, premiere projects etc), so I would copy the whole folder from SSD and paste it to HDD and then choose to skip all the same files to only added the new ones.
Would that broke dropbox or is it fine? or should I keep in mind on what are the new files and only copy those?- Rich
Super User II
... so I would copy the whole folder from SSD and paste it to HDD and then choose to skip all the same files to only added the new ones.
Personally, I would let it overwrite the files even if they already exist, just in case some of them have changed. If you tell it to skip existing files, you may end up not copying a file that has changed.
Ah okay, will that cause an indexing or syncing problem tho? I don't want to make dropbox think that there is a problem and try to re-download all of them again (because it's a very big file size)
- Nancy
Hi again! In this case, you can only choose to add the files that you’ve updated while working on your SSD drive (but you’ll need to be sure that there weren’t any updates in the rest of the files that you skipped, like Rich mentioned before).
Okay thank you guys!
