Trying to move from C drive to D drive - I am OUT of space. But keep getting error message. "SOme files can't be moved. Please select a new location or close some open files and try again..
I've found a solution that, while somewhat complicated, will allow you to move the Dropbox folder location on Windows 10 if you get the error "Some files cannot be moved" WITHOUT re-downloading your files. This requires admin level privileges.
First, open Windows Task Manager - you can do this by right clicking on the taskbar.
Now open the Dropbox Preferences and select the Account tab. The move location button probably won't work if you're reading this guide, but you might as well try it again at this point.
Switch to Task Manager and position the window so you can see both it and Dropbox Preferences at the same time. In Task Manager, select "explorer.exe", right click it, and select 'End Task'. At this point any file explorer windows will disappear along with the taskbar. You'll get them back later. Next select the Services tab and navigate to WMPNetworkSvc. This can be done quickly by clicking the 'Name' column to sort alphabetically, selecting any service in the list, typing 'w', and scrolling down until you see it. Right click on it, and select 'Stop'.
Now switch to Dropbox Preferences and try moving your location again. This should succeed. If so, in Task Manager, select WMPNetworkSvc, right click, and select 'Start'. Then press File -> Run New Task. Type 'explorer.exe' and hit enter. This should restart your taskbar.If your problem is solved, you're done with this guide. Otherwise I have some troubleshooting tips.
[Troubleshooting] Download Process Explorer (http://filehippo.com/download_process_explorer/) and open it as an administrator. Press CTRL-F and search for "Dropbox". Many processes should show up. Each of these could potentially be the process that is keeping your folder locked. Start by stopping/ending explorer.exe and WMPNetworkSvc and try moving the folder in the Dropbox Preferences window again. Don't ****** any Dropbox.exe processes. If you find a process that is keeping Dropbox locked and is marked hidden, you can ****** it using the command prompt. Take note of the process ID (PID). Open a command prompt window as an administrator, and type "Taskkill /PID [your process id] /F". After killing each subsequent process, retry moving your Dropbox folder. After a successful move, reboot your machine.
Hi Scott, you can try selectively syncing some files and then completing the move.
I'm also seeing this issue. I'm on OSX and I need to move Dropbox into the secondary drive on my iMac. I get the same error message, and so I restarted the iMac and tried to do the move again, but Dropbox does continues to give the same error. There were no open files and there is certainly enough space on the secondary drive on my iMac. I have also tried selectively syncing and trying to do the move again, but to no avail. Any ideas what the issue is?
Anybody find a solution to this? I've unsynced everything and am left with an empty Dropbox folder but it still won't move.
Answering my own question in case it helps someone else out...
I'm using Dropbox 3.4.3 for linux and was attempting to move the Dropbox folder to a volume with a space in the name (in my case, it's labelled "Media One"). Moving the dropbox folder to a mount without a space in the label name worked fine so I'm assuming there's a bug in the code that parses directory label info from the OS to Dropbox.
I am also trying to move my Dropbox folder from my user directory on /Volumes/Macintosh HD to a memory card installed in the computer at /Volumes/StorEDGE/.
I'm on Mac OSX 10.10.3 and Dropbox is v3.6.7.
The move successfully transfers about 8000 / 73000 files and then displays the following message:Some files can't be moved. Please select a new location or close some open files and try again.
I have nothing open that would be interacting with Dropbox files.
Has a solution been found for this?
I think I have tracked this down to the in-use .DS_Store files. You can see a list of these by opening a terminal and running the following command:lsof -l +L -R -V | grep /path/to/Dropbox/
Trying to delete these files is another issue! It seems to be recreated when it is deleted.
I had the same problem in Mavericks/Yosemite. After hours of messing with selective sync, I finally narrowed it down to an alias that was sitting in one of the folders. Once that was deleted, the DropBox folder location moved with no problems - now I wait a week to re-downlad all the data that I selectively un-sync'd while troubleshooting....
similar issue on windows for anyone running into this issue. ****** windows explorer before/while moving and it should work!
Still stuck on this issue. Trying to move dropbox from primary drive to secondary internal drive. Haven't found any alias files from the terminal method suggested above. And have unselected all folders from selective sync to make sure there are no active files. Anyone else got other suggestions?
Found this on another site and it worked perfectly for me:
".... deleting the hidden .dropbox folder should be enough. This is where the account and client settings are stored. Deleting it will force the client to recreate it as soon as you open Dropbox. It'll take to the same initial setup wizard where you login with your account and then choose/point it to new folder (do not accept the default options)."
Hope that works !!
I too am having this issue (on a Windows 7 Professional machine). Closing Windows Explorer did not do the trick for me. I want to try ".... deleting the hidden .dropbox folder " as suggested by Nitin V. but don't have the computer expertise needed to find this "hidden" folder and perform the operation (with confidence). Can someone provide a more step-by-step description of how to achieve this?
Answering Mark P - I have tested out the following instructions on a Windows 10 computer and on a Windows 7 computer, but I don’t have a Windows 8 or 8.1 machine so I’m not sure of the precise steps for those two operating systems. I expect, though, that the instructions here will give Windows 8/8.1 users sufficient guidance so that they can work out what to do on their computers, too.
Now, use the Dropbox shortcut (see step 1.1) to restart Dropbox. Those folders you deleted from AppData have deleted the previous account and client settings, so the Dropbox configuration wizard will start up as though Dropbox has never been previously installed. You will be able to specify the new location for the Dropbox folder and will not meet the “open files” problem. However, you will burn up some data allowance while your Dropbox files download from the server to the new location - you can't just copy them across on you local machine.
What Nitin suggested about ''deleting the hidden .dropbox folder " worked for me.
I just solved this problem, and it is how I do this:
In my case, I just try to move dropbox folder to the external flash memory card. And I found that if the format is been set to ******, it will show the error message like "some files can't be moved".
And once I format it to "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)", the problem just be solved.
Hope that works!
Hello, I am having the same issue. I already formatted to Mac OS Extended but it's still not moving. Any solution so far?
My final solution is that:
Unsync all folders and then move the dropbox directory to new location. Sync them again.
That's time consuming(take me about over 40 hrs to sync all of my files), but work for me.
Just ran into this myself. I'm running dropbox on windows 10. I was trying to move dropbox from the default location (my profile folder on drive C) to a new internal drive. Everything I tried I'd get the error. However, after much wasted time I tried moving it to somewhere else on drive C, to see if that would make a difference. Worked first time. Tried to go to the new drive and it failed again. Had to force it to setup from scratch again in the end
I suspect that when dropbox says it will move your files to the new location it literally tries to do that using a move file API on the top level dropbox directory. This will only work if the files are being moved to the same partition though (it just relinks them, doesn't physically move the files), so dropbox immediately gets an error when it tries to do so. What it would need to do in this case is to copy all the files to the new location then delete the originals.
By the way, you can reduce the resync time. Initially set it up with no folders syncing (using selective sync, untick all folders). Once it's finished setting itself up and reports its up to date, go back into preferences and switch on all the folders in selective sync. As soon as you see it create all the folders in your dropbox folder, pause syncing, and copy all of your files back into the new dropbox folder (from your old dropbox folder). Some may already be there, so tell the copy to ignore those. When they're all done resume syncing. It will still potentially take a while, but rather than downloading everything, it will just reindex them (ie, spot they are the same and mark them as synced)
Rick P.
Thank you so much.
I didn't have to try the other solutions posted here.
Renaming my ****** disk from Local Disk to Local (removing the space) instantly solved my same problem.
Thank you.
In Windows after unselecting most of my folders and trying a few other things, what ended up being effective was to run Dropbox as an Administrator. There were files that needed to be moved that required escalated privileges.
[This thread is now closed by moderators due to inactivity. If you're experiencing a similar behavior, feel free to start a new discussion in the Ask a Question section here.]
I have 40,000 ~300KB images in a folder. I am trying to archive them into a different folder. This folder is not synced with my computer due to size/complexity.
I want to move all of the files in this folder into a new folder, but it simply doesn't work on the DB website. If I wait for it to finally "select all" and do the move operation, it just hangs for hours and does nothing. Alternatively I am happy to just rename the folder [folder name]-archived but trying to rename it fails as well.
I have syncing on my PC paused, so that shouldn't cause a problem (even though it's not synced anyway).
