Renaming Dropbox root folder

[PaulFurness]

I have just spent over an hour reading post after post in the DB community, with many, many users asking for the feature of renaming the Dropbox root folder on their local machine.

EVERYONE that posted hates having spaces and brackets in the folder name. Plenty of poeple want to make the path very short (eg "c:\DB") and the "official workaround" of using links doesn't work as expected on OSX often, and there is no support for it anyway.

WHY CAN'T WE DO THIS?! Core architecture issues are not trivial, but people have been asking - no, DEMANDING this feature for 5 YEARS!!!

It's not THAT hard to do. It's fine to have a default name for the folder that dropbox uses when it first runs, but for goodness sakes, why not add a simple custom option to the desktop client - hide it behind some kind of "advanced settings" button if you must - that let's me simply TELL dropbox what to call the folder. Would the code seriously not be able to cope with reading that value as a variable from a config file rather than generating it on the fly?

Someone from dropbox devs: Tell us why it's so hard. We're paying for this stuff after all - in my case, my company has over 70 Dropbox business accounts, so this isn't just one guy in his bedroom asking this!

[Megan]

This idea has been closed as it has reached the end of the Share an Idea process.

[vacation]

This issue breaks dropbox for me for one software.  I can't use symlinks because that software looks for the actual directory its in and doesn't support spaces in the names.  If dropbox let me change the name to just dropbox instead of Dropbox (Org), I would be fine.  Has this been fixed yet? I see people asking for it for ages but no solution.  I know it may not be a big deal to dropbox devs, but for someone using dropbox with as a developer having an enormous path with spaces and perentheses is not convenient. For now I will not use dropbox for that part of the project and not have good backups. 

[Riz1]

I just signed up for a trial of Dropbox Business Advanced. I faced the same problem. 

On my system it shows as:

d:\Dropbox (Your team)

And on my teammembers system it is

c:\Dropbox (Company  team)

Very nice, but the data we share among the team has to have the same path!

When i saw the msgs posted here i guessed Dropbox team will not respond to this. So i had to find a workaround. Here is what i did. I assigned the path to a virtual drive as follows:

on my system, at the CMD prompt type. 

subst X: "d:\Dropbox (Your team)"

now this path is set to a new virtual drive called x:

For more info on subst command, type HELP SUBST at the command prompt.

on my teams systems, i typed:

subst X: "c:\dropbox (Company team)

This path also set.

Now I can have refer X on all PCs to have a consistent path for files.

Note: the subst command is valid only for current session. Which means this needs to be run everytime you restart the system. Else put it in some startup procedure.

Hope this helps.

Riz

[utkudiril]

I am having the same problem. I will have to pay for another SW to solve this problem (sync to another directory). In the tool surveys at my company (Facebook), I will make sure I give the lowest score to Dropbox. I am not sure how you can not solve this problem in many years. 

[rvollum]

I'm in the same position as the OP here. I looked for well over an hour, not being able to believe that somehow a particular specific name can possibly be important to a software package. From what I read, it has been literally years that people have been asking for this "feature". I wrote software for over 20 years and can't think of a single reason why this is hard to fix, especially since Dropbox itself can and does rename this folder on the fly for its own purposes!

I'm trying hard to standardize on cloud-based storage and was a fan of personal Dropbox for years. I've got to have control of the naming conventions, or it simply does not scale for me, period. It makes me wonder what other things are too hard for the dev team to figure out, honestly. I am simply mystified here...

[ConnorDesign]

Not being able to rename the root folder just shows Dropbox is a joke.  Google Drive allows this.  This is not a hard feature to code and could be done by a hobbyist such as myself but such a waste of time since I won't be getting paid for it.  Well, I know which service to transfer to at least.  Dissapointed a corporation doing as well as you guys can't figure it out after this many years.

[lordzyx]

please, make this change! i hate the "dropbox" folder.

[cosmolux]

Wish I had seen this thread before I followed some incorrect advice on renaming the root folder which left me with unsynced critical files and useless symlinks.  Lets have this fixed already.

[scrabbl]

I work in a huuuuge tv/media production company and we considered Dropbox Business/Team for our ~80 teams of ~15-20 members...  Well. Then we found out about the root folder naming problem, tried a set of tools/apps/workflows our employees work with daily and guess what?

Dropbox is off that list now. 

[AIResearcher]

This bug is extremely frustrating for anyone remotely related to programming. We should be able to change the name of the root folder from "Dropbox (company name)" to something without special characters. 

Please please please fix it. The least you can do pretty easily is "replace the spaces and brackets with underscores". 

[mrjazzitup]

Wow can't believe I can't change the root folder. When is this going to be fixed?