I - a TEAM ADMIN - cannot move files or folders from a team folder, to my personal (i.e. ADMIN) folder. I get an incredibly annoying message "files stay here for the team". How do I get around this?
Hey @msakten - sorry to hear you're having issues with this.
Could you walk us through the exact steps you take to do this so that we can make sure we're on the same page?
For example, are you navigating your account to do this or are you doing it via the Admin Console?
A screenshot of the exact error you're getting would be much appreciated!
It happens both in the browser, and on my desktop - on both windows (explorer) and mac (Finder).
I try to move any file or folder from a team folder (that I created as an admin), to my private dropbox folder (or any subfolder in my private dropbox). The file(s) move to the destination folder, but then instantly come back, with this helpful message.
I don't want to change who has access to this file or folder, and I don't want to make a copy. I want to move a folder from a team folder, to my private dropbox folder.
and here is a video
[Removed as per Community Guidelines]
this also happens in the browser, whether i use chrome or firefox, on mac or windows.
Is top level editing enabled for the team @msakten?
Also, have you tried moving the files or folders via the content tab in the Admin Console?
Hi @Walter
top level editing is enabled for admins only, and I am an admin. I don't want team members editing top level folders.
I cannot move via the content tab in the admin console, as the option doesn't appear. When I select a file inside a team folder, and select 'move' on the menu on the right, I am only given the option of other team folders, and not my private dropbox folder.
Hi @msakten, this is expected behavior, as you can only move top level content to other top level content.
It isn't possible to remove it from there entirely and then into your private folder.
So how can I do this @Jay ? I have thousands of files, roughly 300GB, in a folder inside a team folder that was moved there accidentally from my private folder, and I need to move it back and remove it from the team folder, as it doesn't belong there.
You would need to copy the files manually from inside the folder to your personal folder, and then delete the team folder once you're certain all the files have been copied across.
Hi @Jay, is this a planned feature? Because with all due respect, the fact that I cannot move files between folders that I created, and that I am the owner and admin of, and that I'm going to have to instead copy tens of thousands of files, hundreds of GB, seems absolutely ridiculous to me.
Currently, there isn't a feature to allow you to convert a team folder into a personal folder, nor is there any information on if this will change in the future. This has been the same since Dropbox Business teams were created.
Hi @Jay, I'm sorry if there has been any confusion. I am not trying to convert a team folder into a personal folder. I am trying to move a file from inside a team folder, into my private dropbox folder. Please see the images and video from previous posts. I've linked the video again below for your convenience.
Thanks for the clarification. In general, the same would apply for moving files or folders from the team folder into the personal folder.
This is for security purposes to prevent team members from losing access to data and this applies to team admins as well trying to do the same thing.
The only method to get files from a team folder into a personal folder would be to copy them to that personal folder.
Thank you for the explanation, but again with all due respect, I can't see how this makes any sense, because I can:
1. Move the file from a team folder (E.g. folder TeamFolderA), to another team folder which does not have any team members (e.g. TeamFolderB). So all team members of TeamFolderA will still instantly lose access to the data.
2. I can delete the files from the team folder.
And how I - as the admin and account owner - do not have even the option to perform this action is beyond comprehensible to me.
I have the same issue today for something I have been doing with Dropbox for years.
The explanation for this issue is very disappointing and must be false since it has never occurred before. Something must have changed recently to cause this annoying issue, which requires a tedious workaround.
I wish it could be solved so we can use Dropbox as before or at least explained to us why it is happening now.
I just ran into this issue today. I've been using it the same way as you for a long time, and midmorning this morning - I all of a sudden ran into this issue. It was working the way it always had earlier, and now I'm getting this error. There HAS to be something that changed, that can be changed back. How do we escalate this issue to get better explanation?
This issue just started for me yesterday. I was able to drag and drop files into their sub folders just fine, and now all of a sudden I have to copy the file, and paste it into the subfolder, then go back and delete it from the main folder. This terribly cumbersome and time consuming. I need this to go back the way it was working. Is there a fix for this issue? This is the message I get when I try to drag and drop.
Exactly. So this was a recent update issue?
Well yes and no,
Before this last major update, you could just tell dropbox to F off with his "team" folders and just use normal folders shared, you could share individual folders to individual people without needing to share the whole thing
Team folders have some nice features but for users that constantly needed to process data, not being able to move the data back and forth in and out of the individual folders was a pain, the constant nags broke scripts and caused lots of lost time and annoyed employees
"Processor" employees had their own "not shared" folders where they downloaded the data from the team folder, processed it, then moved it back into the team folder after the LiDAR processing was done a few days later, this was essentially impossible using teams.
Now with the new update, were unable to place folders on the dropbox root folder, private files are now forced to be used from the "users" folder, the user folder is a terrible place because it forcefully uses the name of the account as the folder name, there is no way to rename or change this, so we cannot just use the general scripts we use to process the data, we would have to make specific scripts for each employee and rename them every time this changes.
The only way to place a folder in the root folder of dropbox is to make a team folder now, which comes with all the restrictions
This is why this new update sucks, there's no way to work around this and this is what is pissing us all off
I don't understand this and I don't want to. I am the god of my dropbox account and I require the power to move files from a team directory to a personal directory. I had it until today.
In short... you summarized it perfectly 🤣
We pay for our Dropbox, were the master admin, if we want to nuke it, wipe it, reset it we should be able to, period, full stop.
Oh and wait until you find out you cannot delete any teams folders you made by mistake, you can only "archive" them, that definitely adds to the whole "we know better than you" mentality they got going
XionicFire - please say it louder for those in the background. I wish we could get them to undo this update.
Ok this is absolutely unacceptable and I'm furious @Jay please tell me this idiotic bug which is being presented as a "feature" will be addressed or I am cancelling my business account immediately. I just spent the whole day working offline - which involved moving files from team folders to my personal folder (because they were no longer needed in the team folder). Once my internet came back, dropbox MOVED THOSE FILES BACK TO THE TEAM FOLDERS WHILE I WAS RENDERING and completely messed up my renders and project. This is absolutely idiotic that DROPBOX OVERRIDES MY ACTIONS WITHOUT WARNING OR CONSULTING ME.
The original "killer app" of dropbox is that you could do whatever you wanted in explorer and dropbox would magically do the right thing, optimally, to sync it. I mention this for the benefit of newer dropbox engineers and project managers who seem to have forgotten that by engineering a brand new bug that is directly antithetical to the original mission. I'm sure there's a contingent over there that would love to jettison the filesystem integration finally so it's easier for them to manage our file-managing. You are hereby on notice: do. not.
Nothing frustrates me more as a business owner than wasting time. Now instead of just getting work done, I'm on the Dropbox forum dealing with this because my team is angry.
Here we are with yet another Dropbox problem. People are saying they've been doing this for years and it worked fine, now Dropbox is telling us it's expected behaviour and they have no plans to change it? Seriously? Who makes these decisions? Is anybody listening?
It is nice to hear my team is not the only one suffering from this idiotic update. Unless this is fixed immediately, we're cancelling our subscription, as well.
OK, y'all. I came to complain about discovering I can no longer create new team folders via explorer, and ended up unraveling this whole mess. Since all you get from the dropbox "staff" here is gaslighting that brand new things have actually always been that way, I'll explain it the situation.
What's happened is that a system which was formerly organized around "folders in the team space" and "private user folders" has been "generalized" into two types of "top-level folders": "team folders" and "shared folders". Previously "private user folders" were very special, and "folders in the team space" were not: you could freely create and delete them. Today, we're finding we no longer can. It's because they're all special now, just as "private user folders" used to be. It seems our accounts were migrated instantaneously into the new paradigm in the following manner:
"private user folders" -> "folder shared to a user"
"folders in the team space" -> "team folder"
Note: I am using different terminology than the web client, because dropbox staff and dropbox docs do. But the web client uses this terminology (a poor decision, IMO)
Me and DB staff and DB docs call it "Top-Level" -> Web UI calls it "Team folder"
Me calls it "Team folder" -> Web UI calls it "Team folder, who can access: everyone at ORG"
Me calls it "Shared folder" -> Web UI calls it "Team folder, who can access: specific people"
Me calls it "something someone else shared with me" -> Web UI calls "Shared folder"
(I believe dropbox has dropped the ball in clear communication here by trying to be too-friendly for something that's fundamentally complex)
Flash forward to today.
Note, you cannot create top-level folders via explorer. That's because only dropbox proprietary API has the means to specify of the new types of top-level folders it is. Moreover creating is a complex operation because it's more than just syncing filesystem data now. Consider this scenario
1. There's a top-level team folder called FOO, but you don't have access
2. Therefore, FOO is not synced to your workstation
3. On your workstation, you create FOO
4. Wait, what? with what properties? Whaaaat? There's already a top-level foo with established properties. No, no, no. This can't be allowed.
Note, you cannot rename top-level folders via explorer, for similar reasons.
Note, you cannot put files in the top-level. That just doesn't make any sense. The top-level doesn't contain those any more. What about those of us that DID have files there? Was it ever allowed? I would suspect, so. I do notice that the "content" view on the web UI (aka "the top level") has a "show deleted files" option, which is not logical, since there aren't "files" here and there's nothing that can be deleted... unless... dropbox... did they... did they dare.... delete top-level files when "migrating" us to the new scheme? It would be logical but gutsy. Anyone know?
Note, you cannot move top-level folders anywhere else, via explorer OR web UI. Conceptually, that's because top-level folders by definition are sub-typed into one of the new categories; moving it would imply removing the categorization. Technically, it's more likely because a top-level folder isn't even a thing that can be put anywhere else but the top-level.
Note, you cannot delete top-level folders via explorer. If you try, it will undo itself after a couple of seconds (without an error message, as in the case of moving via explorer; this is an error and the client needs to be fixed). That's because there is no longer deleting of top-level folders, only "archiving". Deleting is for actual content. Archiving is for top-level folders, those new special things. The desktop client can't do this, I think, because someone at Dropbox wisely decided that the user needed to be educated about the difference between archiving and deleting, and only the dropbox proprietary tools can do that. In particular, you need to know that there's no UNDELETING those things.. per se... in case you went to hunt for deleted stuff.
Note, you cannot move top-level folders anywhere else, part 2: that may also be because it implies DELETING a top level folder (or removing it, in any sense), which is also forbidden.
Now I also want to consider another horrifyingly convoluted scenario: suppose you move a top-level folder via explorer, and dropbox does a workaround for us: they create the new subdirectory name, then move all the content sub-items, then archive the top-level directory. What happens... when... we... hit ctrl+z? Or, what happens if we hit ctrl+z AFTER another admin or someone otherwise on the web UI does something to the top-level content for the team, such as creating yet another top-level folder with the same name?
Everything falls apart. Everything falls apart because the workstation filesystem is no longer the organizational authority for the dropbox content. THAT SHIP HAS SAILED, Y'ALL. SAY GOODBYE.
We're still a bit lucky: the workstation filesystem is still the organizational authority for content items UNDER A TOP-LEVEL FOLDER. If that weren't the case, I'd be shopping for a new cloud drive right now.
Note, you cannot delete..er.. archive multiple top-level folders at once. There's not necessarily any logical reason for this, but I guess it could be a bit tricky to make edits to the properties on multiple things at once.
Note, you CAN "delete" top-level items from the non-admin dropbox web view... sometimes? I did delete one just now, which I created while testing earlier, but now the "Delete" and "Rename" options are disabled in a new test; this is what I expect: only the admin console should be able to do anything with top-level folders. Still.. this is puzzling.
A workaround for this madness for most of us shall be the following:
1. never, ever create top-level folders. Create a single top-level folder called "stuff". Now inside there you can freely operate. Of course you will need to update all your scripts and pathing muscle-memory.
2. do create top-level folders to simulate "private user folders", if dropbox isn't doing that for you already.
During the research of this, I discovered a quirk in the new paradigm. I accidentally archived a valuable team folder. When unarchiving it, it came back with zero members access. That is, the properties of the top-level folder did not unarchive along with the content. IMO this is a bug, but I guess there could be a complex reason for it (perhaps the set of users has changed since it was archived, and perhaps you've added a user that you do NOT want to have access to it, but yet you had it flagged as ALL, and now that new user would accidentally have access to it).
I do not like that the method for changing the properties on a top-level folder is called "share with dropbox". I think this is a too-friendly way to invite me to share it with outside users, but really I just want to control inside access. The established UX paradigms for this are to edit properties on something, not "share" it.
I suppose it's possible that for people who have NEVER USED DROPBOX BEFORE, the new design may make more sense, but we're confused by our decades of prior experience. At this point I think we need to forget everything we know and suffer through some basic introductory "how to dropbox" tutorial again.
For those of you who made it to the end: I'm sorry. I made it as simple as I could. But it's just not very simple.
I suddenly started having the same issue today. Extremely frustrating. I can delete or move the file out of dropbox to my desktop, but not to my personal folder as Admin. Ridiculous. The kind of thing that will make me seek an alternative service when the time comes.
Hi thank you all for the feedback. We hear you loud and clear, and understand that this is a frustrating experience. We're working on reversing the change to allow you to move files in your team space to your personal folder. I will provide an update here when it is available.
@oz4 I think you will find that the top-level folder you "moved" out to your desktop has magically reappeared in dropbox.
To their credit, they did a good job on selective sync and the "online only" feature, both of which were very helpful for adding value to the core product. Selective sync was actually a workaround for dropbox 32bit process crashing when it created too much work for itself, but the "online only" is such a magically delicious, ingeniously simple, and massively superior solution, that I like to imagine it only happened because they somehow traced them down to all their own private islands and "got the old engineering gang back together for one last mission".
Now back to your regularly scheduled desktop client programming. Today's episode "bold blue bar prompting me to try free signatures".
