Migrating to a new PC

[Alan41]

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. 

I have installed Dropbox on the new machine, and it has started to sync the files that it finds there. However, the files are duplicates of the ones on the old machine, so my Dropbox is filling up with second copies from the new machine of the files it had synced from the old one. 

Help! How do I set up Dropbox so that it will sync new files that I store, but not all the old ones that it already has?

[Alan41]

Thanks @Jay . 

All of the files, local and on the website, have been duplicated [as <filename> (1)].

There are no icons of any sort on the files on the Dropbox website, and both copies of each file open OK. 

Files on my PC have a brown box icon on the original of each file, and that original is corrupted (i.e Word, Acrobat or Photos report that they cannot open it). Most of the (1) copies are OK, but some of these also have the brown box icon and are corrupted [I had not noticed this hitherto - I had thought that all the (1) copies open OK: this may be a new phenomenon?]. 

You suggest marking a file as local: how do I do that?

[Jay]

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

[Alan41]

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]

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]

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?