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Forum Discussion
Henryrchrd
1 month agoExplorer | Level 4
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 Ex...
- 1 month ago
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.
Henryrchrd
1 month agoExplorer | Level 4
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
Dropbox Community Moderator
1 month agoNo worries! I totally understand how you feel.
If you need something else, I’ll be right here! ☺️
- Henryrchrd29 days agoExplorer | Level 4
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?- Rich29 days ago
Super User II
Henryrchrd wrote:
... 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.
- Henryrchrd27 days agoExplorer | Level 4
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)
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