Dropbox refuses to download a file from a 'Phantom' Documents file structure: A hopeless tangle

[Grotaz]

Hello

Dropbox has pushed many of my files on my MacBook Pro into a location in the Dropbox file structure called 'My Mac (Greg's MacBook Air) / Documents'. This is even though the MacBook Air is a computer I do not use any more. So I have a hopeless tangle, whereby modifying a file which looks like it resides on the MacBook Air can cause problems with the MacBook Pro operation. In addition, since these files although they are seemingly on 'MacBook Pro / Documents' are really in the stratosphere of Dropbox and refuse to download. When I have tried downloading a large Final Cut project file using the Web version of Dropbox, the download takes many hours and has twice aborted already. I have had to start from scratch with the project.

I am currently in the process of untangling this mess, but it may all happen again, I don't know.

Any ideas on this?

Thanks

Greg

[Hannah]

Hey @Grotaz, thanks for bringing this to our attention.

It sounds like you have enabled our backup feature on your MacBook Air computer previously, but did you also enable it for your MacBook Pro?

Would you mind sending us some screenshots explaining the situation and the setup, so we can have a visual as well?

If you go to your Dropbox folder, do you see a "Mac" folder that has your MacBook Pro desktop files in it?

Thanks in advance.

[Grotaz]

Hello Hannah

Here is a screenshot from the Macbook Pro.

Here are two from the Macbook Air. They show that the drop-down path window says:

My Mac (Greg's Macbook Air)

while the Finder view says:

Mac (2).

This is inconsistent and confusing.

[Hannah]

Thanks for the screenshots, @Grotaz.

Hmm, if you check your backups page online, do you see both computers backed up there?

[Grotaz]

Yes.

So, how do I delete these computers from this page without losing the files?

[Jay]

Hi @Grotaz, have you tried copying the files from Finder, instead of trying to move them instead? What is the exact error you're getting, if any, when doing so?