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Forum Discussion
Logged out of the Dropbox app and back in and now I have a 'Dropbox (old)' and a 'Dropbox' folder
Application Affected
Synching files
Device
PC
Operating System/Browser (if using the web)
Windows 11
Dropbox App Version (if using the app)
Windows Desktop
Question or Issue
Had a funny problem with the Windows Explorer status icons not all being corrected, and saw a recommended to "simply" sign out of Dropbox and sign back in. Simple enough. Which I did.
I then got a pop up asking me (telling me really) to rename my Dropbox folder. I said OK, and I now have a Dropbox and Dropbox (old) in the User directory. All of my files are in (old). None are in new. Every link on my PC to my old files is now of course broken. I paused syncing because I am worried Dropbox is going to try and create an entirely new copy of all of my files in the new Dropbox folder.
Does anyone know what it going on here? And how to put things back to they way they were before? Why on earth would a logout/login totally reorganize all of my files???
I'm kind of dead in the water right now so any help would be greatly appreciated. Dropbox support seems to be non-existent.
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Update. Re-indexing made zero progress overnight. Right clicking Dropbox in the system tray no longer works. Dropbox was hung Tech support had me kill Dropbox (then they claim to have killed it on my PC somehow as well) and reboot my PC . Dropbox came alive after the reboot, asked me to login, and now back to the exact same screen that wants to rename my existing Dropbox folder to (old). Which in theory will cause an entire duplication of all of my locally stored files. Screenshot is the popup I get.
Finally got tech support to do a screen share. Seems to be a bug - but he cant get hold of anyone in engineering.
Moral of the story is - any time I log out of Dropbox and back in again it will create an entirely new Dropbox folder on my PC and try to fill it up with all the same files that I keep locally on my PC.
This may be the end of Dropbox for me.
Ok so Dropbox support thinks that somehow the fact that I have a personal box and work box that, since they were linked (whatever that means) when I logged out, Dropbox "inadvertently" (i.e. a bug) decided to "rename" my work box folder to the same name as it was before and change the original to (old). All this makes zero sense to me.
The fix in process was to go into Prefs -> Accounts, hold the Alt key, an reset folder locations. Interestingly they did not instruct me to delete the newly created empty box and rename the old one back. When I asked they said "oh good idea" lol. So in short I killed Dropbox, deleted the new box, renamed the old one back to it's original name, restarted Dropbox, and did the Alt -> reset folder locations.
It is now re-indexing. No idea if this is really fixed yet or not. Reindexing takes hours or days. So tomorrow morning it's either fine or totally screwed up.
Total waste of a complete half day of my time as I am trying to close out our fiscal year on Dec 30th. Seems every time someone at our company touches Dropbox it's a mess. Might be time to move on...
- Hannah
Dropbox Community Moderator
I see, thanks for providing this info, edp4.
Since syncing is currently paused, I'd suggest moving only the contents of the "Dropbox (old)" folder to the newly created Dropbox folder.
Once the move is complete and only then, you can unpause syncing and the app should only index and check for changes.
Keep me posted on how it goes.
Interestingly I had no choice. There was a pop after I re-logged forced me to do so. I did not choose to. The old path was C:\Users\<my name\<company name> Dropbox. This was renamed to C:\Users\<my name\<company name> Dropbox (old). And now there is an empty folder C:\Users\<my name\<company name> Dropbox. Yes they are in the exact same folder C:\Users\<my name and the exact same drive of course.
- Hannah
Hey edp4, thanks for joining the Dropbox Community.
This seems to have happened after you chose to rename your Dropbox folder.
What is currently the location of the new Dropbox folder that was created? Is it in the same drive as your original one?
Let me know and we'll go from there.
