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Re: change my dropbox folder name on my PC

change my dropbox folder name on my PC

Elliott F.1
New member | Level 1
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I have my dropbox folder in the D drive of my computer. For some reason, the dropbox folder is not named "D:\Dropbox", but "D:\Dropbox (Elliotfan)" with my account name together. Does anybody know how to return the name back to "D:\Dropbox" without messing up the saved files?

Thanks.

55 Replies 55

Stefanie
Dropbox Staff
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Thanks very much for your feedback Fernando. I will forward to the respective engineering team!

Best,

Sofia

Suat S.1
New member | Level 1
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Dear Sofia,

I tried this workaround already but after this the Finder Integration doesn't work perfectly anymore. The Dropbox-Icon in the sidebar doesn't appear (after renaming Dropbox (Personal) to Dropbox, even if I have a symlink).

Would be awesome if we could decide not just the destinaton folder, but also the folder name.

Kind regards

ps: it would also be amazing if Dropbox for OSX would have two different icons for personal and team for the Finder sidebar and Finder context menu integration, but this would be another topic 🙂 just wanted to mention, thank you

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誠信
New member | Level 1
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 從104.12.10下午大約1點左右我的Dropbox裏的文件檔名及檔案類型完全被更改以至檔案無法開啟,還有Dropbox中各個資料夾皆有出現一個檔名為HELP_YOUR_FILES的檔案。煩請幫忙解答,謝謝

Luke D.6
Collaborator | Level 8
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What is even worst is Dropbox requirements, especially for business accounts, eats into the 255 character problem for folder/filename lengths.  'Dropbox SuperCompanyname' might take up 8 Characters for the 'Dropbox' and maybe 10, 20 or 30 characters for the business name.  If we have the ability to rename the folder to whatever we wanted, we could use 'dbx' and save a lot of problems with some embedded folders/files not being synced due to the 255 character limitation.

It all boils down to simply not having a read-only configuration file that can store the 'actual' dropbox folder name and Dropbox use it throughout their sync process.  It's something Dropbox should seriously consider changing and it won't interfere with previous installations as an update would save the current sync folder name.

 

Justin M.34
Helpful | Level 5
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New to Dropbox business. Like Fernando, I came from here: from: https://www.dropboxforum.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/202867585-How-do-I-rename-the-root-folder-

REALLY unfortunate to read through these forums and find these hacky, unsupported workaround answers. Especially after having what I would honestly consider excellent customer support from the Dropbox team helping me strategize and transition all our Pro accounts to a unified Business account.

As a web developer, I finally got all my synching done ( took 2 days to get all synced up, 250gb/700k files ). And today I finally get back into some coding, running into errors left and right - only to track them back to the space in the Dropbox folder name.

So... any other options besides a symlink? That solution is unacceptable for us. 

And as a technology company - Dropbox should KNOW BETTER than to force a folder name with spaces AND special characters. That is day one dum dum stuff for anyone who works on a computer for a living. Whomever came up with the brilliant idea of naming a business folder 'Dropbox (Company)' should be let go immediately. My biggest fear is that, developers weren't questioned and some suits and project managers thought it would just 'look pretty' with a space and parens. Ugh.

Will be calling support tomorrow. Without a direct workaround, sorry Dropbox - you've got a good product and great customer support, but you screwed the pooch at the most basic level with this naming convention. 

 

 

Luke D.6
Collaborator | Level 8
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Justin,

I've been in the computer/networking/internet(ARPANET) technology for 45+ years.  Dropbox is only carrying on the legacy of big tech companies that think they know what users want or need more than users.  It goes back all the way to the short-sighted thinking of only using 2 digits for years just to save a few bits.  FYI, I can't tell you what a headache it was in the mid-90's to 1999 going through millions of lines of code to get 2 digit years changed to 4 digit years as well as re-code functions and calculations.  Next up was the 8.3 file names which those headaches are still with us today.  Someday, some company is going to listen to users and/or plan for 100 years in the future but I won't be living long enough to see it. LOL

 

Rich
Super User II
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So... any other options besides a symlink? That solution is unacceptable for us. 

No, there are no other options.

Justin M.34
Helpful | Level 5
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Thanks for the lighthearted humor on the subject, Luke. Hindsight is 20/20, and I sympathize with your plight. With Dropbox Business being only a few years old, this is human error rather than any lack of insight. Keeping spaces out of directory names is compsci 101 that predates even the earliest versions of Dropbox.

*Sigh*... Dropbox Business had me really excited. All the features I was looking for to supplement our local NAS. Going to try out this symlink hack job for a minute, but it looks like I'll be moving to another service and spending another few days moving all my company's data. Fun stuff.

That one little space is a deal breaker for us. Very unfortunate to find this out the hard way once I was 95% setup and ready to add my whole team. 

Luke D.6
Collaborator | Level 8
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Justin,

I'm not sure exactly what you are doing but the DOS character for space is "%20" or you can include the entire location string inside quotations "c:/dropbox mybusiness/documents" in any programming or macros that you might be using.  It does work but, again, Dropbox should have put an 'underline' character instead of a space.  Stupidity exists even at the highest level of intelligence. 🙂

 

Justin M.34
Helpful | Level 5
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Yeah, I can get around it, its just causing unnecessary complexity and issues with my setup. I have some node modules that are tripping over the space and I'm not about to monkey patch 3rd party dependencies to get around Dropbox's space when there are other options. For me its not the end of the world to work around, but I don't want it to be company policy to have to explain an undocumented and unsupported hack to everyone on my team every time they get a build error or filepath issue. I rely on my cloud service too much to have a symlink hack in the middle of it, even if only for my general piece of mind.

Been on Dropbox Pro for years and years ( along with my team that I also pay for ), and have had Dropbox personal since pretty much Day 1. There's been a few rough patches in the past, and I keep coming back because Dropbox is a great tool with excellent customer support. But yeah, going down my list of other cloud services... c'est la vie.

 

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