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How do I rename the root folder?

I recently joined Dropbox for Business on a trial basis. As part of the process, it forcefully renames your Dropbox folder to "Dropbox (Personal)". I have since decided not to use Dropbox for Business. Although I now only have one dropbox folder, it is still called "Dropbox (Personal)" - it did not automatically change back when the accounts were unlinked.

How do I get Dropbox to change the name back?

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DaveC2

Unlink the DB app from your account, rename the folder, relink the DB app (do not use previous settings when prompted).

All comments

DaveC2

Unlink the DB app from your account, rename the folder, relink the DB app (do not use previous settings when prompted).

Adi S.3

Dave's solution doesn't work (for version 3.8.8).

When relinked, DP creates default C:\User\USERNAME\Dropbox folder.

[windows 7]

Luis M.2

Hello

You need to UNLINK your account and then link again.

Dropbox creates a new folder called just "Dropbox" o "My Dropbox" near your old "Dropbox (whatever)".

Active the synchronization in Dropbox say YES if asked you for Sync all the files in your dropbox to this folder

EXIT DROPBOX, move ALL your files from "Dropbox (whatever)" to the new "Dropbox" folder created, then ERASE the all "Dropbox (whatever)".

OPEN DROPBOX and RESUMEN SYNC

Wait until the SYNC is complete.

I discovered this today and I'am doing this right now.

Regards.

DaveC2

Adi S. : you did it wrong, it worked for me just now.

Nexus T.

I need to rename my dropbox for business folder. I just want it to be g:\drobox not g\drobox(BUSINESS NAME). How do I accomplish this?

DaveC2

Nexus T.

You cant, the application keeps renaming it back to add the biz name if you did manage it.

(pretty rude of them really, changing folder names on biz customers, but I guess its who cares we have there money already, lets make it nice for the free account!)

Anyway, what you can do is create a symbolic link folder that mimics the original folder name.

(They were meant to do this for you but dont all the time)

If you on a windows machine, perfom a dos shell then in your case type

MKLINK /D "G:\DROPBOX" "G:\DROPBOX (BIZ NAME)"

That will mimic the folder to the name you want (each of the folders is present, but they are the SAME location, so dont go and delete one thinking that you dont need it, as it deletes both)

Steve G.61

I've run into many programs that have problems with spaces and parenthesis in file names.

Is there any way to rename the dropbox folders so the names are more Unix/Mac friendly? Something like ~/Dropbox-Personal and ~/Dropbox-Company would be great.

Symbolic links to a directory doesn't help since OS X file open dialog converts these into the "official" name when you click through the symlink.

Rich

Is there any way to rename the dropbox folders so the names are more Unix/Mac friendly?

Technically, no, there isn't. Dropbox will always use a space and parenthesis in the name for team accounts. However, see the response from a Dropboxer in the following post for a possible workaround.

https://www.dropboxforum.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/201852169-change-my-dropbox-folder-name-on-my-PC/comments/205768176

DaveC2

Symbolic links to a directory doesn't help since OS X file open dialog converts these into the "official" name when you click through the symlink.

Thats a complete and total fail on the part of OSX

Steve G.61

That works nicely. Thanks.

I agree about the OS X behavior being wrong.

DaveC2

Technically, no, there isn't. Dropbox will always use a space and parenthesis in the name for team accounts. However, see the response from a Dropboxer in the following post for a possible workaround.

https://www.dropboxforum.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/201852169-change-my-dropbox-folder-name-on-my-PC/comments/205768176

Will must say that was interesting to find out, and in essence means YES you can rename the folder to ANY name (I just did) as long as you establish a symbolic link folder using the DROPBOX (BIZ NAME) (or personal etc) to point to that location. (I moved and renamed mine)

I wonder if this is something DB had to work on to perform, IE detect its a symbolic link and follow it, or if the Notification service resolves this to the truepath on enrolling?

Fernando Henriq1

I've just tried the Team Dropbox Account and the Personal changed the name

As i read above and also did, doesn't work to disconnect from Team Account to reset the Personal name to "Dropbox" again.

It has become such a pain. None a single program finds the files because of the name changing and worse, the headache of all headaches. Programs I write and LaTeX reports must have no accents, no spaces and so on, on path and file names.

I'm on a crossfire between, OR rearrange a huge amount of data because libraries and sources are on a specific folder other than the file that use it, OR find the best solution to rename Dropbox.

The UNLINK and RELINK options seems to work fine if Mr. Luis M. is correct.

And WHY?! OH WHY?! Did the Dropbox Team decided that the best way was to change the folder's name without asking me first?

And worse, insert a !damm! space on it? It is like to break the most important rule/constraint of all files and programs I use/write.

DO_NOT_USE_ACCENTS_OR_SPACES_IF_A_PROGRAM_NEEDS_TO_POINT_IT.

RuThaN

These solutions are simply very user unfriendly, pleas simply rename button right beside Move button..

Im needing this feature maybe 3 years.. Its not too much, simply possiblity of change one stupid string..

GBatteries E.

Same here - biggest pain with added spaces in the folder name (i.e. existing LabVie .exe files does not allow for it...)

The easiest solution was to create a virtual drive and point to the folder by running cmd:

C:\>subst b: "C:\Users\Jonathan\Dropbox (Company)"

Cody B.6

I'm having trouble with this issue as well. I'm writing markdown documents in Mou, and I can't point to an image file in dropbox because it can't handle the spaces or parenthesis that are in the name of the root folder. Any word of fixing this?

Fernando Henriq1

to Cody B.

look this discussion page:

https://www.dropboxforum.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/201852169-change-my-dropbox-folder-name-on-my-PC?page=1#community_comment_205768176

There are a few methods for it. One of them is the one I did and solved my problem.

Justin M.34

Cross Post from this thread: https://www.dropboxforum.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/201852169-change-my-dropbox-folder-name-on-my-PC?page=1#community_comment_205768176

New to Dropbox business.

REALLY unfortunate to read through these forums and find these hacky, unsupported workaround answers. Especially after having what I would honestly consider excellent customer support from the Dropbox team helping me strategize and transition all our Pro accounts to a unified Business account.

As a web developer, I finally got all my synching done ( took 2 days to get all synced up, 250gb/700k files ). And today I finally get back into some coding, running into errors left and right - only to track them back to the space in the Dropbox folder name.

So... any other options besides a symlink? That solution is unacceptable for us.

And as a technology company - Dropbox should KNOW BETTER than to force a folder name with spaces AND special characters. That is day one dum dum stuff for anyone who works on a computer for a living. Whomever came up with the brilliant idea of naming a business folder 'Dropbox (Company)' should be let go immediately. My biggest fear is that, developers weren't questioned and some suits and project managers thought it would just 'look pretty' with a space and parens. Ugh.

Will be calling support tomorrow. Without a direct workaround, sorry Dropbox - you've got a good product and great customer support, but you screwed the pooch at the most basic level with this naming convention.

Rich

We don't need multiple threads for the same issue (or duplicate replies on both). To continue discussing this please refer to the following thread:

https://www.dropboxforum.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/201852169-change-my-dropbox-folder-name-on-my-PC

Thank you.

davidhere40

I have a much better solution. I have over 50GB of data in my dropbox. So even the solution where I reinstall to get the default folder name wasn't acceptable to me. So I found a great work around. Just create a symbolic "hard link". I had never used one before, but it's supported but all windows, linux and mac. Here is how I created the link:

1) Open a cmd prompt as admin. (Search for cmd.exe, right click and then click run as administrator)

2) Execute: mklink /J "C:\Dropbox" "C:\Dropbox (Personal)"

Now you can use "C:\Dropbox" (or whatever location you decided on) to interact with the same files as if you had typed in C:\Dropbox (Personal). All software and programs will now treat it as if the folder were located there The best part is that this solution is easy, fast and doesn't have any downsides.

JuhaPalomaki

Trouble is that some development tools do not honor the links. I'm for example working with some Node projects and running into troubles with this. The tools are not using the linked name, instead they figure out the actual path on disk and use that. This is a problem, because some of these tools have problems with the parenthesis and/or spaces in the directory names.

So far the only thing that only thing that has really worked is the good old subst command. For example:

subst p: "C:\users\juhap\Dropbox (Personal)"\proj

creates another drive P: which ponts directly to the proj folder on my Dropbox. This however is not a perfect solution, since this does not work on the Windows 10 subsystem for Linux.

I would really appreciate if Dropbox provided a proper solution to this. Would not need to be anything complicated, just some way of setting the actual folder name to whatever user likes.

Vieira

The worst thing about this is that if you are sharing a project that needs compiling (like a c++ project) now all of the sudden your path name has a space character in it! Bad practice in programming of any kind. So the link might make sense in this case.

johnmac1

In all my years working with Dropbox, this is the first fail . The value of Dropbox as a platform has been its cross-platform friendliness. PLease please fix this!

dizern

Guess what? It's 2019 and people still have the need to rename folders... I've been using dropbox business, so my root folder was "Dropbox (Personal)". After I switched off from business and reinstalled windows on some computers. I ended up with several computers in different cities with different folder names as new ones are installed as "Dropbox". Now I need to relink paths to footage in my software each time I use distant render machines and then change them back. It would be nice to have an automatic switch back to Dropbox or the way to rename the folder. The solution in this thread does not work as "the folder is open in another program".

anchorball

I agree - it sucks. I've ben with dropbox over 10 years - since they started really - and they built their business on personal accounts.

Higher management must have prioritized enterpise accounts and pretty much geared all useful settings to be oriented to them instead of to everyone - which would make more sense. I would think this could be a simple category in settings. You login - go to your settings and change your name. It boggles my mind they haven't thought of or considered this. In cats it's not considerate at all really.

I just went through having them merge my account into an eneterpirse account for a company I was freelancing with - I accepted an invited to their team and next thing you know the accounts are merged - doesn'ty make sense it could happen so easily.

The setup was very easy for it to happen - and on the enterprise side - with little warning or hurdles to jump through. Howver, when I contacted support about fixing it - the admin of the company who runs the enterprise version of dropbox had to switch it. Why wouldn't dropbox enpower all of it's users to have this switch in their settings? It feels discrimanatory, not thoughtful and is downright frustrating. If all the other cloud storage systems didn't suck so much I'd definitely switch after this experience. Talkiing to supprt about this was like speaking to a brick wall. Very lame and frustrating.