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.

[Longhorn469]

I would like to add on to this feature request as well. I would like to be able to change the name of the root folder AND/OR be able to make the dropbox root folder the root of one of my drive partitions (i.e. D:\).

Like others have said Google Drive allows this.

[Daphne]

This idea is going to need a bit more support.

We've updated the status to encourage more users to back you up!

[rwmorris]

The Dropbox Business root folder has parenthesis and spaces in the name, and it can't be changed. This has been raised with Dropbox support for over 5 years and they have done nothing about it (e.g., Can you remove the space in the dropbox folder name). 

Various work arounds exist, and because I have to keep doing this every few years mine is below. But it shouldn't have to be this hard so please upvote this idea or even better: upvote the original idea from 2017!.

Workaround:

After installing Dropbox through Sydney University business account, it creates a folder called "Dropbox (Sydney Uni)" in my home directory by default, which breaks all my code in shared projects. So I want to rename the default folder to "Dropbox" (I don't have a personal Dropbox account).

After installing Dropbox and once it has finished downloading all my files to the default directory, the blue badges will disappear and be replaced with a green tick on all the completely downloaded files. I am now ready to begin.

1. Quit Dropbox (select the cog in the Dropbox menubar item).

2. In Finder, rename the "Dropbox (Sydney Uni)" folder to "Dropbox"

3. Open Terminal and navigate to your home directory 

cd ~

4. Create a symlink to the "Dropbox" folder with the same name as the default Dropbox directory (in my case "Dropbox (Sydney Uni)")

ln -s Dropbox Dropbox\ \(Sydney\ Uni\)

5.  Hide the new symlink so you don't have to be reminded of the stupid decisions of the Dropbox development team every day

chflags -h hidden Dropbox\ \(Sydney\ Uni\)

6. Check my work

ls -l

drwx------@ 12 rich  staff   384 19 Nov 21:10 Dropbox
lrwxr-xr-x   1 rich  staff     7 19 Nov 21:27 Dropbox (Sydney Uni) -> Dropbox

7. Restart Dropbox. It shouldn't complain about anything since it sees the new symlink as the default folder

[Ross_S]

Thanks for the work around @rwmorris ,  I'm very interested to see how many upvotes we get for this one. It's something we've considered before, but there's never been a huge amount of user feedback on this. This ideation board is hopefully the perfect place to gauge interest from our customers.

The symlink solution should work, generally due to restrictions on the watched path, and the way the sync engine detects file system events, there can be situation where content changes are not noticed and subsiquently synced, but I'm glad this works for you in your setup.

A removed restriction reduces friction in our product experiance, so I'll upvote this too.

[pleaseRemoveExtraCharacters]

Please make the Dropbox folder easily scriptable! Spaces are bad but parentheses are an abomination. Easy alternatives: Dropbox_Company, DropboxCompany

Thank you!

[Corianton]

I am SO annoyed by this. I should be able to call it simply "Dropbox" because it contains much much more than my business documents. Actually, for what I pay, I shoud be able to call it whatever the hell I want to. Please address this issue asap, thank you!

[communitynetradio]

I recently switched to Dropbox Business, but had to switch back because the path associated to my FOLDERS/FILES got longer.  I would like to be able to customly RENAME DROPBOX to simply DB.  

[mrs1]

It's now 2021 and this still isn't fixed. Unbelievable.

[Server_Align]

Others have suggested shutting down DB, moving the DB folder and creating a as named symbolic link at the original location to the moved to location.

I would suggest following this you check if on the fly syncing is working. (not on start up syncing). The reason is the on the fly update detection is done from the expected name path, if this is a symbolic link the OS may not report any file up dates.

I would suggest something much simplier, leave the folder where it is and create a symbolic link where you wanted it to be.

* I have used DB for many years I have found they actively attempt to cause you issues if you try and side step soemthing, try OneDrive as an alternative. *

[JoshyJosh]

Please make it possible to change the name of Dropbox, .dropbox.cache, etc... to make sure it is not obvious that this is my Dropbox folder, if I wish to hide it from others.