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Forum Discussion
Reconnecting synch to external drive?
Because my haddrive lacked space, I set up Dropbox to synch to an external drive connected to my MacBookAir. However, whilst travelling I disconnect the portable (external) drive and when reconnecting Dropbox fails to find the path back to the Dropbox folder on the external drive.
I have tried to change the path in the Dropbox advanced settings but all that does is create a Dropbox/Dropbox folder which would obviously defeat the purpose.
Does anyone know how I can reconnect Dropbox to my external drive to ensure it continues to synch?
Thank you.
OK, here's the fix for Mac. First, rename your existing folder of files on the external drive, I chose something appropriate, "ScrewedUpDropbox." Then start from ground zero, quit DB and toss the folder it created on the system drive. Startup and relink to dropbox, let it create that folder on the system drive again and as soon as it starts syncing, pause it. Go to Preferences, change the dropbox folder location to your External HD and hit OK through the prompts. Wait for Dropbox to do its thing reloacting the folder. Before unpausing, go to the external drive in the finder and move all of your folders in "ScrewedUpDropbox" into the newly created "Dropbox" folder that's now there. Then unpause syncing. It will resync to all your files without copying, takes a fraction of the time. Whew!
Hmm, it sounds like when you're linking the folder back up you are placing it inside the Dropbox Folder instead of leaving it in the parent directory. Basically this is like copying a folder and then pasting it inside itself.
Make sure that the path is pointing at the exact same folder that it was set up as before.
It sounds like you were really close to getting it to work, just one file under. With that said, you have to be careful when using external drives this way. By default Dropbox isn't really set up to do file management on external drives so you're going to have to work harder to get it to do what you want.
If you do not have to work with these files on a regular basis, you might want to look at using selective sync to only keep the files you need on your computer and keep the rest on Dropbox's servers. If you have not already done so, this should free up some space.
One last thing to check is to make sure that the external drive is being given the same drive letter, as this could also break the pathing. Depending on set up, this might change each time you plug it into your computer.
I hope all this helps.
- Thanks Bitdropper but unfortunately Dropbox won’t allow me to link to the folder one level up which is essentially the drive itself. I am now also out of synch between my online Dropbox and the drive because whilst this is not working I’m saving only to the drive. Thank you for the advice though!
That is strange; it should have let you select the drive itself as the "folder" and then created the Dropbox Folder inside of it. I tested it and the only message I received was "The folder already contains a Dropbox directory" because I was putting it in the same location. This is what you would want it to do though. I also tested connecting an external drive to see if that was the issue you were seeing, but that gave me the following message: “This will move your Dropbox folder and all the files inside from its current location to M:\Dropbox”, to which I said cancel because I figured this should probably work and it would take a long time to put it all back. You can check to make sure it is working correctly by looking at the path where it says "Dropbox folder location." All my testing was done on a 64 bit Windows 7 Ultimate OS. I could be missing something about how the Mac OS is handling it, but this does not seem like an area there should be differences. It is also possible that the Mac version of Dropbox has some differences, though I do not see why this would be one of them.
If you have not already, make sure that you are selecting the drive itself as the folder. If this functionality is not working for you at all then the next step would be to contact support here:
