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Alan41's avatar
Alan41
Explorer | Level 4
3 years ago

Migrating to a new PC

I have bought a new PC and migrated all the files from my old PC to my new one.  I had Dropbox on my old machine, and had synced all my local files onto it. I want to do the same on my new machine....
desktop
Install
Setting up the apps
sync
Jay's avatar
Jay
Icon for Dropbox Community Moderator rankDropbox Community Moderator
3 years ago

You can mark files and folders as available offline (or local) by following these steps. Let me know how it goes.

Alan41's avatar
Alan41
Explorer | Level 4
3 years ago

Well, we are making progress (of a sort). I left my new PC on last night, with Dropbox syncing. OneDrive had already synched. 

This morning, sync was completed, and all the brown box icons have gone. All the files can be opened correctly. So the 'corrupt files' problem seems to have resolved itself.

 

We still have the 'file duplication' problem. I can go through my Dropbox and delete all the new copies - that seems to work OK.

But why did it happen?

Was it a conflict between the Dell Migrate Tool, which somehow disturbed the Dropbox on my new PC (and hence the synched copies online) when it was copying my files from my old PC to my new one? I installed Dropbox on the new machine whilst DMT was running, although I had no error messages at all. 

Or was it a conflict with OneDrive, similarly? 

 

What do you think?

  • Jay's avatar
    Jay
    Icon for Dropbox Community Moderator rankDropbox Community Moderator
    3 years ago

    It would be hard to say at this point. In general, migration software doesn't play well with Dropbox since the files themselves have their own permissions from the previous machine, and might conflict with the new machine. 

     

    There could also have been some form of conflict with OneDrive as well.

     

    The most reliable method would be to have the files sync down from the site as normal once signed into the Dropbox desktop application on the new machine.

  • Alan41's avatar
    Alan41
    Explorer | Level 4
    3 years ago

    Or perhaps to uninstall Dropbox (and the local folder) on the old machine; then migrate the rest of the file system to the new machine; then install Dropbox on the new machine using the same account details, and allow the online files to sync down? 

    WinZip follows that procedure, and has a help page to explain it -  How to transfer WinZip to another computer (corel.com)

    They are transferring a single-machine license as well as the application, so the situation is slightly different; but the method should work just as well, I suspect. 

    Perhaps a similar help page on dropbox.com would be useful? 

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