Dropbox files & folders
Get in sync with the Dropbox Community. Our members can answer all your questions on Dropbox files and folders. Join a discussion or start your own today.
I recently had to restore my Mac from Time Machine, and for some reason after doing this, the main dropbox folder (with desktop, documents, downloads, etc) is now hidden in finder. This is also keeping me from turning on Backup, because dropbox can't actually find the folders.
The folder is still visible in the dropbox application, and as far as I can tell, I can still access all of my files from the finder sidebar, but I would like to fix this in order to be able to have backups of everything. I'm also not sure if the folder being hidden will cause some kind of file mess-up down the line, so I'd like to get it straightened out before anything happens.
Below you can see a photo of my dropbox folder in finder (with hidden items visible).
Anyone run into a problem like this before?
Walter
Community Moderator @ Dropbox
dropbox.com/support
Did this post help you? If so, please give it a Like below.
Still stuck? Ask me a question!
Tips & Tricks Find new ways to stay in flow or share your tips on how you work smarter with Dropbox.
Hi Walter! Thanks and happy Monday to you as well.
I am using two different computers to link files between them (a desktop at work and my personal laptop), but each one only shows up once in that list. But notably, the "My Mac" folder on my work desktop is visible, so you may be right that it had something to do with Time Machine.
I did try and reinstall the dropbox app, but that didn't change anything either.
I was also able to restore the backup capability of the downloads and desktop folders. To do this I went to their pinned locations on the sidebar of Finder and chose "show parent folder". This led me to their dropbox location. From there I copied the entire folder back to it's location on my hard drive, and this allowed me to back up these two folders. It seems dropbox was looking back to that location to try and back up? The original backup error message was something like "the folder isn't in its original location".
I haven't done the same with my documents folder, because I probably have 700-1000gb of data, and not all of it is stored locally (and can't be since my hard drive isn't big enough). Anyway, I don't want to risk anything because my files are pretty sensitive.
When I copied those two main folders (desktop and downloads) it also duplicated all of the files in those folders – so there would be "FileA.jpg" and "FileA (New).jpg". This is obviously easier to manage when it's 5-10 files on my desktop versus 100,000 in my documents folder...
The only other bit of info I have is that I updated a bunch of folders on my work computer on Friday, and only about 30% of the changes happened that night – the rest didn't happen until Sunday afternoon. That may be more of a cache issue than anything though it sounds like?
Thanks for your help!
Walter
Community Moderator @ Dropbox
dropbox.com/support
Did this post help you? If so, please give it a Like below.
Still stuck? Ask me a question!
Tips & Tricks Find new ways to stay in flow or share your tips on how you work smarter with Dropbox.
No worries! But yes it's still happening. Any thoughts on a fix?
Walter
Community Moderator @ Dropbox
dropbox.com/support
Did this post help you? If so, please give it a Like below.
Still stuck? Ask me a question!
Tips & Tricks Find new ways to stay in flow or share your tips on how you work smarter with Dropbox.
Please do! Thanks
Walter
Community Moderator @ Dropbox
dropbox.com/support
Did this post help you? If so, please give it a Like below.
Still stuck? Ask me a question!
Tips & Tricks Find new ways to stay in flow or share your tips on how you work smarter with Dropbox.
The way we work is changing. Share and discover new ways to work smarter with Dropbox in our community.
Sound good? Let's get started.Hi there!
If you need more help you can view your support options (expected response time for a ticket is 24 hours), or contact us on Twitter or Facebook.
For more info on available support options, see this article.
If you found the answer to your question, please 'like' the post to say thanks to the user!