I warn people about confusing Dropbox behavior

I got this question about a post I made on Reddit.

u/areyouredditenough, I’m not sure I understand your question. The best I can think to do is to tell you what I did.

One day I discovered that Dropbox didn’t seem to be syncing files from my computer to my iPad and other laptop. I panicked a bit and started making sure that ~/Dropbox had the files that I wanted it to have. I downloaded a bunch of stuff. In other words, I soon had TWO versions of Dropbox, one partial one in the old location, one in the new one that I knew nothing about. And syncing still didn’t work.

Finally I noticed the warning about CloudStorage (well hidden) and realized that that I had TWO versions of Dropbox.

So what I did was rename ~/Dropbox to ~/Dropbox-old-location and then made it unreadable:

> cd; mv Dropbox Dropbox-old-location; chmod a-rwx Dropbox-old-location

(At least I think that’s how I did it.)

Then I made a symbolic link so that things would look normal:

> cd; ln -s  Library/CloudStorage/Dropbox .

So now this is the situation chez moi:

> cd; ls -ld Dropbox*
lrwxr-xr-x   1 ge  staff   28 Dec 10 16:37 Dropbox -> Library/CloudStorage/Dropbox
d---------  28 ge  staff  896 Sep  9 14:23 Dropbox-old-location

I hope this answers your question. I used shell commands to explain what I did because that’s the way I did it. Obviously I’m using MacOS or whatever Apple marketing calls it now.

Thinking it over

u/areyouredditenough,

Rereading your post, I think you’ve managed to catch Dropbox in the process of moving its files and you’re wondering if you could speed things up by moving the files yourself. If that’s your question, I don’t know the answer. Your idea sounds reasonable, but will Dropbox figure out what you’re doing? I have no idea. My cautious nature says to wait and let DB do its job.

Let me know if I understand your question better this time!