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Why do I have a duplicate Dropbox folder?

I had to reset my Dropbox password recently and for some reason upon signing in again on my Mac it seems to have duplicated my Dropbox folder. I wasn't aware of this at first but it seems I've been saving some files in what seems to be the unlinked folder and some in the linked one. I have no idea how or why this happened and there was no period of copying or downloading that I noticed. The old one seems to be in ~Library/CloudStorage along with the new one. The new active on of course has the Dropbox logo beside it. 'Get Info' doesn't give me the folder size of the old one but the size of the CloudStorage folder is under double the new Dropbox folder. This is slightly suspicious. Obviously my concern is losing documents and now figuring out a way of picking out files that are only updated in the old offline folder. This could take hours.

Is there a neat way of merging both folders with priority set to keep all new updated files?

Thanks

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Jay

Hi @Blackbamboo, thanks for bringing this to our attention.

Could you clarify what you mean by both folders being in the CloudStorage location? A screenshot of this would help greatly.

Did you sign into the same Dropbox account, or a different one?

Any other info would be helpful!

Blackbamboo

Hi Jay, thanks for your reply. When I resigned in with the new password, just minutes later, it seems a new Dropbox folder was created (as above).

It's the same account - I've only ever had this one account on this machine.

Screenshot attached

Screenshot 2023-11-29 at 10.16.14.png

Jay

It shouldn't be possible to have two folders in the same location with the exact same name, regardless of Dropbox or not.

Could you right click and choose Get info for both these folders and attach screenshots showing these windows?

Blackbamboo

The duplicated one (actually I imagine it was the original one) is of indeterminate size. The Get Info, no matter how long I wait, will not show this information.

The CloudStorage folder is 9,049,642,281 bytes, rounded up to 9.1Gb with 10,885 items

Official Logo Dropbox folder is 4,821,631,299 bytes, rounded up to 4.84Gb with 5,447 items

As there is no 'Get Info' info we can use maths to determine that:

(Original) Dropbox folder is 4,228,010,982 bytes (worryingly over half a gig smaller) though has 5,436 items (which does seem about right given the number of files I've probably created since the incident).

Despite you saying two folders can't exist with the same name, this clearly refutes that! There are files in one that are not in the other but I don't know all the folders where this is the case, and could take a while to find out which I'm trying to avoid.

I can't attach a screenshot of my folder system as it contains personal information.

Is there a simple way of merging these folders without losing the newest information?

Jay

Currently, there isn't a method to merge these two folders, since there shouldn't be a folder with the same name, as an OS itself couldn't allow this.

I'd recommend checking with Apple directly in order to determine the name of this folder, since the Get Info prompt isn't working.

Blackbamboo

Why does the name of the folder stop us from finding a solution? The name in Get Info is listed and seems to be Dropbox (24-10-2023 15/48)

Jay

Okay, so the folder name is different. This means that the folder was created on that date, and contained the information on the account from that date.

Since it isn't syncing any longer, you can delete that folder once you're certain all necessary files have been removed from it, if any are missing in the current Dropbox folder.

Blackbamboo

OK, I've assumed that already. Dropbox has created this issue, I'm just after a simple way of determining which files are in the wrong folder - i.e. *some files that I updated in the old folder thinking it was the live synced Dropbox folder. Is there any way of figuring this out without going through every single folder and subfolder?

Jay

No, there wouldn't be a method of doing so via Dropbox, aside from checking the modification dates of files in that folder.

There may be some third party tools or services that could help to compare the files in both locations.

Blackbamboo

That's a shame. We trust Dropbox with out files and organisation. It's very frustrating to learn that it can break so spectacularly from just changing a password. Perhaps it should be looked in to?

Jay

We appreciate the feedback on this matter.

We take all comments into consideration when improving the Dropbox site and services.