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Merging folder contents within the same Dropbox account

Hi, I'd be grateful for help with the following inquiry... over the years of using Dropbox, I've ended up with a number of folders (and/or sub-folders) of the same name located in different folder 'trees', with similar but not identical file contents (eg. 1 folder may only contain half of the file contents of the other). I'd like to combine/merge those folders and their contents in a single location, rather than continuing to have them duplicated in different places. Obviously, I can do that manually by dragging and dropping the files from one folder to the other but I'm wondering if there's a more efficient way to merge folders of the same name that contain different file contents, making sure that none of the files from either folder are lost? Thanks in anticipation.

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Daphne

Hi there @pesas, thanks for reaching out to us here!

To merge the contents of your folders, it wouldn't be something that you can do automatically through Dropbox I'm afraid.

This is something that you could do perhaps on a connected computer, as your OS should have the function to detect if files are the same and give you the options to replace, make a copy of or not move duplicate files.

Another suggestion would be to have a look for some third party apps that could help achieve this automatically for you, instead of having to do it manually. You can do this with a quick web search.

Sorry that I can't be of much help with this, but please do let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks!

pesas

Hi Daphne,

Thanks for getting back to me about my enquiry. I suspected that this may be the outcome but I appreciate you taking the time to confirm that. Cheers, Gary.

Daphne

Thanks for getting back to me here @pesas!

If there's anything else that I can help with, don't hesitate to give me a nudge here.

Hope you have a great rest of your week Gary!

gclunsf55

I realize this thread hasn’t been active in a year and a half, but I want to bring this back up. I have Dropbox as the primary storage for all of my files, which total about 1.5 TB. My reason for doing that is both my wife and I use iPhones or iPads for about 99% of our computing needs using a wide range of apps which interoperate with Dropbox. I do have Dropbox syncing to 1 Windows laptop which, in turn, backs these file up to external drives; all of this for backup purposes. It is not uncommon that I come across multiple folder that should be merged. These folders may or may not contain files with the same names. Today, if I attempt, from the mobile app, to move these files from one folder to another, the move operation fails with a nebulous error message and doesn’t move ANYTHING if there are any files with duplicate names. To accomplish the merge I have to resort to a very tedious and laborious process of identifying the files having duplicate names and select those that don’t one-by-one to move. Dropbox IS a file manager, at its heart, that happens to use cloud storage as it’s primary storage platform. Merging file folders, including properly handling duplicate-named files with user prompts and allowing the user have their response apply to all such files, is functionality that’s been in place with other file managers for decades. This functionality should have been built into Dropbox very early in its lifecycle. Users should not have to resort to third party file management apps nor to using desktop computing platform file management apps such as MacOS Finder and Windows File Explorer to accomplish such basic functions. That’s an untenable and inexcusable answer and strategy. That this has not been prioritized as a critical need ahead of limited-usage new functionality reflects a Development and Management team that don’t use their own product and have little understanding of theme needs of their customer base. This needs to be addressed ASAP.

hillelab1

Totally unacceptable - the whole reason we have dropbox is to store and manage our files in one place - its time dropbox got ita act in order and provided tools for basic file functions such as merging duplicate folders. its not like you haven't had YEARS to sort out this problem.

Not Happy with Dropbox. Please fix this so I dont go elsewhere

Jerry G.8

Actually there is a fix. Create a new folder called something like "merged" then copy both folders into that new one. Once you are done with deleting duplicates, etc., you can merely delete the two original folders. Vioila!

Pavelkas

I would also like to merge the contents of multiple folders into one. Dropbox developers, we need this feature!