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Drive letter change in small team to same drive letter.

Hey there,

i would like some advice on what is the best practice to change the drive letter on a few workstations to the same drive letter.

Currently we have a few workstations with a team dropbox account on different internal drives.

For instance,

- Workstation 1 has dropbox on 😧

- Workstation 2 has dropbox on F:

- Workstation 3 has dropbox on X:

- etc.

We would like to change all the drive letters on the workstations to the same drive letter X:

This is useful for us so we can work on 3d projects, have all the same paths in our 3d scenes.

So all the workstations are not having issues with missing textures or missing objects for instance.

What is the best way to go about this?

Thanks in advance!

Cheers,

mlon

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Rich

@mlon wrote:
Since we are not moving anyting (no new drives etc.) but we like to standardize all the workstations to have the same Dropbox path.

What you're trying to do really isn't supported by Dropbox (change an existing drive letter while Dropbox is installed on that drive) and it has no way to make such a change. Your best and safest option would probably be to uninstall the Dropbox application, change the drive letter, then reinstall Dropbox being sure to specify the new location in the Advanced Options during the install.

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Rich

@mlon wrote:
We would like to change all the drive letters on the workstations to the same drive letter X:

You can use the option in Dropbox Preferences to move the Dropbox folder to a new location.

https://help.dropbox.com/installs/move-dropbox-folder

mlon

Hey Rich,

thank you for your reply but that is not what i want to do.

I am familiar with moving dropbox to another location.

What i want to do i change the drive letter Dropbox is allready on.

And have all the workstations have the same Dropbox path X:

What will happen if i turn off the Dropbox app, change the drive letter

and turn the app back on? Will it find the Dropbox folder now located in X: ?

mlon

Rich

@mlon wrote:
What will happen if i turn off the Dropbox app, change the drive letter and turn the app back on? Will it find the Dropbox folder now located in X:?

Best case scenario is that it would simply prevent Dropbox from working as it wouldn't be able to find the Dropbox folder. Worst case scenario is it would see the missing Dropbox folder as a deletion, and start to delete files from the account online, such as what can happen when the Dropbox folder is on an external drive and the drive isn't connected when Dropbox starts.

mlon

So what would be the best thing to do?

Since we are not moving anyting (no new drives etc.) but we like to

standardize all the workstations to have the same Dropbox path.

Rich

@mlon wrote:
Since we are not moving anyting (no new drives etc.) but we like to standardize all the workstations to have the same Dropbox path.

mlon

Yeh, thanks! That was my idea too!

Was just hoping there would be a less involved solution.

squips

I'd love to have a simple solution for this too. I'm in the exact situation as mlon. Intuitively, it seems like if you stopped DB, changed your system drive letter, then went into DB's sync location and changed it to the new drive letter, and then turned DB back on it would work.

I don't know what's happening behind the scenes that would prevent that from happening and don't want to risk it deleting my archive.

Rich

squips wrote:
... and don't want to risk it deleting my archive.

The only safe way to accomplish this is as described. Uninstall, change drive letter, reinstall using the Advanced Options dialog.

squips

I found another way that seemed pretty safe. The drive I have is a large drive, of which I was only using about 10% of. So, I made another partition on that drive and made the drive letter I wanted. Then I moved dropbox to that drive. After it finished, I cleaned the original partition and reallocated that space to the new drive letter.

Jay

Hi @squips, thanks for the suggestion! This should help other users who have similar queries and are looking for an answer for their requirements.

mcouvill

Ugh, just left a similar question before finding this. Dropbox should really add this capability. I can do this in other drive sync apps with no issue. Some even have "I mounted my drive to a new letter" option. They do a quick scan for changes and then it runs fine without interruption. A complete re-sync would pretty much halt work for days and doing "selective sync" where it only downloads when you access the file has led to far too many user complaints of missing files when they are in an area with limited connectivity.

There really has to be someway to do this wthout Dropbox saying "It should work but I might delete all your files."