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how do I eject my external hard drive without deleting everything

I recently synced my dropbox to my external hard drive. However, I have heard that if you remove your external hard drive from your macbook then everything on your dopbox will be deleted. How do I eject my external hard drive without deleting everything? is that possible? if its not possible, then how do I just remove dropbox from my hard drive without deleting everything?

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Jay

Thanks for the info. If the Dropbox folder is on the external drive, then you need to ensure that you fully quit the Dropbox desktop application from your machine prior to removing the drive to prevent any deletions.

Likewise, when you next want to run the app, make sure the drive is connected and mounted under the same drive or name to prevent deletions.

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Jay

Hi @carlosr27, thanks for messaging the Community!

Just to clarify, do you mean that your Dropbox folder is on the external drive, or you used the Dropbox Backup feature to backup the external drive on the site?

This will help me to assist further!

carlosr27

Hey Jay!

I believe my dropbox folder is on my hard drive. I just recently downloaded dropbox and when it asked which folder to sync to I chose my external hard drive.

Jay

Likewise, when you next want to run the app, make sure the drive is connected and mounted under the same drive or name to prevent deletions.

carlosr27

Thank you so much! I was also wondering, on the off-chance that I want to remove my hard drive halfway through syncing everything, how would I go about that? Is there a way to cancel the sync process without deleting anything?

Walter

Hey @carlosr27 - sorry to jump in here.

I just wanted to mention that there's no way to cancel syncing, but you can pause it following these steps or move the files that are syncing out of your Dropbox folder and let the app sync your changes till it's up to date.

Let us know if you have any other questions.

carlosr27

Thank you so much for your response Walter! I was just wondering because my hard drive doesn’t have enough space compared to how big my Dropbox is. I’ll probably get an error saying that the hard drive is full so is there anything I can do to prevent this? If I eject the hard drive now will it erase my Dropbox?

Walter

You can use selective sync to remove some folders from your hard drive as this would help free up some space, if needed @carlosr27

And yes, if you eject your hard drive while the desktop app is syncing, this will probably lead to some data loss, so I'd advise against it.

carlosr27

Thank you again Walter! I will try that. Only issue is that my dropbox is 36TB and my hard drive is 12TB so it will probably take a very long time to do that. If there is anything else I can do, please let me know!

carlosr27

Hi! So I accidentally began syncing my entire dropbox to my hard drive. My dropbox is using 40TB and my hard drive only has 12TB. How do I stop the syncing without deleting everything from Dropbox that I downloaded? I've paused it at 500GB. Also for context, this is not a back-up.

Nancy

Hi Carlos! Sorry to jump in here.

Did you follow these steps to move your Dropbox folder from your external drive to your internal drive?

Are you able to open your app preferences, and try Walter’s suggestion above about selective sync?

carlosr27

Hi Nancy, I would follow those steps but my internal hard drive is only 500GB, my dropbox has 36TB of files and my external hard drive only has 12TB so I just want to cancel the sync process until I get a new hard drive.

Nancy

Hi again, Carlos!

In this case, you can try unlinking - relinking your Dropbox app to your new hard drive once it arrives (you should be able to pick the syncing location of your choice by selecting the “Advanced link settings” before completing the sign-in process). Please keep in mind though, that since the Dropbox app hasn't fully synced on your current drive, this may result in data loss.

What I’d suggest, to be safe, is to make a copy of your files to another location (outside of Dropbox - perhaps on your old external drive), so that you don’t lose anything during the process.