Deleting online files for resync through Synology NAS

[Krayakin]

Hello,

I use Dropbox to keep an online back up of my Synology NAS. The folder containing the files I want backed up is synced automatically in the background, which works great. However, from time to time I need to reorganise or consolidate how these files are stored or organised, which Dropbox then detects as new folders and syncs them up as well, as duplicates of the existing folders. This takes up a lot of space, and also makes searching for files more cumbersome because search results will return both the original folder and the renamed or reorganised folder with the same files.

I could clean these manually by looking for duplicate folders and deleting the obsolete ones, but this would take a lot of time and I can't always tell at a glance which folder is the most recent one, so I would need to check all of them before I can do anything. Instead, I would like to delete my entire online archive and have it resync from the most recent version of these files on the NAS box. It will take time, but it would be a welcome spring cleaning.

Are there better ways of achieving the same thing? Is there any reason why I should not to this?

(I am not worried about losing files on DB that are not elsewhere, so I'm not worried about deleting everything).

Any advice is much appreciated.

[Walter · Accepted solution]

Hi there @Krayakin, thanks for using Dropbox and welcome to the Community!

I can't think of a better way to achieve this other than the one that you mentioned. Have you considered using our desktop app on your computer and re-organizing your files and folders from within the Dropbox folder?

This would help avoiding duplicates as the desktop app would sync your changes without duplicating your files.

I know it's not much, but I hope this helps a tad. 

[Krayakin]

Hi @Walter ,

Thanks for confirming!

That is in fact quite useful. Interesting point as well about the deskptop application and desktop folder. I have this installed but don't always use it. So, if I make any adjustments to folder names from there then the online folder will get renamed instead of getting duplicated? I guess this works with any changes I made.

What I will need to figure out is whether I can do this from ny Synology NAS because I don't think the Dropbox app is compatible or available with my basic NAS OS. In which case it's good to know there's no point in looking for an alternative method to get rid of these duplicate folders. Thanks! 

[Walter]

Yes, exactly @Krayakin - any changes you make on your files within the Dropbox folder while the desktop app is running on your computer, will sync to the website and vice versa. 

Let us know if you have any other questions!