For years I have maintained my main dropbox on an external hard drive recently, I had to do a factory reboot on my Mac mini and after downloading the Dropbox app, I am not able to see how to set that up. What are the proper steps to do that?
Thanks for your post on the Community, @Maureen W.! If your old Dropbox folder is still on your external hard drive, then you can follow step 11 of the advanced reinstall steps mentioned here. Basically, you need to click on the “Advanced Settings" link during the sign-in process on the desktop app, and this will let you select your existing Dropbox folder. Just make sure to choose the correct filepath/the parent folder, as mentioned in the Help Center article above, so as not to create a new Dropbox folder within the existing one by accident. Let me know, if you need any further help after that.
Would that it were so easy!! A convo with the Dropbox chatbot revealed that the external drive must be an encrypted APFS format and the library must have fewer than 50K files. I reformatted the drive but in checking out encryption before doing it, I learned that it would apply only to NEW docs on the drive & that old docs were at risk of deletion or at least retrieval by some finagaling. I started copying the drive contents to another drive so nothing would be lost by encrypting and turned my attention to determining number of files - apparently there’s no easy way to do that on the mac or Dropbox front?? If you know of one, pls let me know. My library is huge (1.7TB) so I’ll be out of luck with any external drive if I’ve got more than 50K files. My mac mini can’t handle that much library. Guess I’ll have to resort to leaving lots of it just in the cloud, which is a pain. thoughts??
Hi from me as well, @Maureen W.!
If you're indeed using the File Provider version of the Dropbox app, the file limit should be 500.000 files, not 50.000.
You can see the rest of the eligibility criteria here.
As for the number of files in the Dropbox folder, what if you control-click on it and choose "get info"? Can you see the total item count there?
Hmm, 500K is a huge relief. Fingers crossed re the number I’ve got. And no, the Get Info option shows only bytes, not files. An Apple support person gave me a command to use in Terminal to count the files but permission was denied when I tried it. Am still researching to find a method to count. I don’t know why Dropbox itself doesn’t provide that info - would see a no brainer and of great help to users. Not sure what the File Provider version of the app is????
Thanks to both of you, Nancy and Hannah. I greatly appreciate your input!
We appreciate your feedback here, Maureen, and we're happy to help!
The Dropbox folder is just another folder on your computer, just with syncing abilities, so finding the number of files would be something you'd do through your OS.
I looked a bit online though, and I found that while the "get info" window should show the number of items in a folder, you can also follow these steps:
I'm not a Mac user myself, but hopefully that'll do the trick.
As for the File Provider version of the Dropbox app, you can see if you’re already on it, by checking the "Dropbox folder updates" in the "sync" tab of the Dropbox preferences.
And you can see more about the update itself here.
Hannah, thanks much. I was able to determine that I'm on the File Provider version - I remember when that change came about but didn't take the time at that point to dig in and figure out what it meant. Looking over the online info about the version, I saw further info about the external drive option - which corresponds with what support & this forum has been conveying. It seems that the only remaining issue is the file count question. Unfortunately the method you mentioned (thanks very much for taking the time to research it!) shows only the number of items (subfolders) immediately below the dropbox folder - so it's far fewer than the total number of items. I'm still on the hunt for a good method of figuring that out. Hopefully my next Apple t/c will give further guidance. Again, thanks much for all of the input.
