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Two Dropbox folders after migration from old Mac to new
A couple of days after I did my migration I noticed on the new Mac there are two dropbox folders, the one that should be syncing with my other devices is called “DropBox personal” however, after the ...
Nancy
Dropbox Community Moderator
Dropbox Community ModeratorYou can definitely try this as a test, before following the previous steps.
Now, if you make your files available offline, they should remain as such even after they’ve been copied to your external hard drive (given that you also have enough space on your local hard drive).
I've had a degree of success, pausing DropBox sync on my two MacBooks removing folders that were imprinted with false modified dates by DropBox replacing them with folders from the duplicate dropbox folder that was off-line that had correct modified dates (named DropBox personal) and the correct dates seem to stick.
This shows some promise, but I feel at every turn I'm being undermined by DropBox imposing new ‘last modified’ dates on its own on folders that were not part of this replacement-fix experiment. By this I mean when I sort by date-modified, I see that dozens of folders I have not used in months have been given recently modified dates (post that 9/24 migration date). This is really a nightmare what is going on? This never used to happen on the old MacBook. Being able to sort by last modified date is so fundamental to my workflow and at every turn, it seems like DropBox is undoing the correct modified dates and updating it with a more recent date despite the *complete lack of activity on said folder.*
I don't know if this has any bearing, but since the new MacBook has more storage, I've opted to enable the preference "available off-line" thinking that would help the situation of files behaving like normal local files and simply getting mirrored to the cloud and other devices.
Even though files are getting populated to my old MacBook, there are issues there related to modify dates, but I'll save that for another time as what I've described above is really the central and fundamental problem. Thanks in advance for any help.
Paul
Sure would like some help with this, Nancy are you there?
- Jay
Hi Paul D.4, currently, there aren't any further steps we can try in relation to the modification dates for folders on your device.
In general, folders do not contain modification dates, as they are only directories containing files, and no actual data in the 'folder item' itself. The OS would be the one to determine when a folder is considered to be 'modified'.
This behavior can be duplicated when moving files to or from an external drive, like in this Apple Support thread. There are many other threads on that site that indicate similar issues with the modification date of folders, or other random behavior, however, files tend to keep their correct dates.
Jay this behavior is new to me, I had such a positive experience for years where DropBox contents retained the folder modification dates as reflected in the Finder and not munged by DropBox.
