I have a shared folder that was named "research" and that really turned into a folder to hold all my stuff on academia. It is shared across a few accounts that I control (not sure if that is important or not - I've had this happen with non-shared folders, as well). I renamed the folder from "research" to "academia". This has kicked off what appears to be a re-download of all the files in that folder on all computers that have this folder into a folder of the new name. Is this really what is happening? If so, shouldn't there be a way to adjust the name without having it become an entirely new folder and so force a new download of the entire thing?
This might be related to a phenomenon that I've seen when I bring a computer back online that has been off for a long time (more than a month, not sure where the cutoff is). I have done similar renaming of folders that contain lots of files while one of my machines is off, and when I eventually bring up a computer that has the old name for the folder, not the new one, it consistently fails to detect that a rename occurred and so uploads the entire contents of the folder with the old name, and then downloads the entire contents of the folder with the new name. This appears to also indicate that the identity of a given folder is not maintained separate from the name. This makes a certain amount of sense, but I wonder if there isn't something you could do about it?
Anyway. Any help understanding what is going on here would be appreciated. I have started to be gunshy about renaming folders in dropbox because I'm wary of having to clean up when I bring up a backup partition or machine I haven't used for a while that will not deal correctly with the rename. And, it is annoying to have it take hours to deal with a rename, as well (I renamed this folder about 2 hours ago, and it is still not finished processing on the local computer where I made the change).
Thanks,
Jonathan Morgan
