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Can I sync a single folder with selective sync, without downloading its entire directory?

Suppose I have a folder structure as follows: Folder A contains File A and Folder B. Folder B contains File B. Something like:

Folder A

|- File A

|- Folder B

|- File B

The expected behaviour is that if I choose "Selective Sync" and click only "Folder B", this should locally sync Folder B and File B, but not File A. (ideally, a "-" sign should appear for Folder A with the option to click the checkbox to sync everything in Folder A).

The actual behaviour is that selecting Folder B (via the checkbox) automatically checks "Folder A", and Dropbox will attempt to locally sync File A as well as Folder B.

This is the behaviour on Ubuntu; if this differs on Mac or Windows please post below.

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Comments

Rich

SamJaques wrote:
The expected behaviour is that if I choose "Selective Sync" and click only "Folder B", this should locally sync Folder B and File B, but not File A.

That is not the expected behavior. The expected behavior is that selecting Folder B will also cause any files at the same level to sync as well. It's working as designed.

SamJaques

If I wanted the files in Folder A to be synced, I would select folder A. Maybe a better way than phrasing it in terms of "expected behaviour" is that if I want to sync Folder B but no other item in Folder A, nothing allows me to do that. If Folder A only contains folders, this is possible (I uncheck selective sync on every folder except , but not if Folder A has "loose" files.

You might ask: why not just create a folder in Folder A for "not B", and then uncheck that folder? Dropbox for web times out or crashes when I try to do operations with a large number of files, and this naturally occurs when using it for photo uploads. Maybe Dropbox for desktop can do this, but I don't have enough disk space to download the folder to do this operation (hence the question!).

Eventually I solved my actual issue by asking Dropbox to auto-sort the photos (which took two tries, again because the web interface is not reliable!) but I still think selective sync should be more expressive.

Nancy

Hey @SamJaques, hope it’s OK if I jump in. About the issue you mention with the Dropbox website, can you let me know a few more details perhaps (just in case you want us to look into it further)?

For example, how many files are you working with when the Dropbox website crashes? Is the behavior consistent across different browsers?

Walter

Hi @SamJaques - I'm just circling back to see if you saw our last reply.

In case you still need any help feel free to reach out with the information we requested and we'll take it from there. If your issue has been solved, let us know what worked for you!