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Dropbox syncing issues between Windows and Mac due to incompatible characters

We have shared document libraries with multiple users with both Windows and Mac and recently we have encountered an issue where some data is not syncing to devices. It appears Dropbox allows the addition of special / reserved characters in file and folder names and these files and folders are therefore simply ignored and not synced to devices.

What is the best way to approach this issue and is there an easy way to rename all files, folders with special reserved characters in the file / folder names online and therefore they are able to sync?

How can we search for these specific instances and ideally rename them all to avoid issues?

Notably reserved characters include the following and potentially others? " * : < > ? / \ |

Thank you for any assistance any one can offer, it is much appreciated.

Cheers

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Hannah

Hey @J10000, welcome to the Dropbox Community.

This is indeed a situation that happens very often between Windows and Mac computers.

I'm afraid there's no specific or automatic way to search for or rename those files; it has to be done manually.

Once the files are renamed, though, they should automatically sync across all connected devices.

Let me know if you have any questions.

J10000

Thank you for the reply Hannah.

The total DropBox data for this user is approximately 1.6TB with hundreds of thousands of files in multiple libraries i.e. 1 x library is hypothetically 150GB and 200,000+ files.

How do we search and locate all of these files to even begin to manually rename the problematic data?

Shouldn't this be blocked by DropBox to ensure data is available across multi OS environments?

Thank you again for your response, advise.

Cheers

Hannah

Thanks for your reply, @J10000.

I completely understand where you're coming from, however, this isn't really controlled by Dropbox, but by the OS.

You can search for files as you normally would through the search bar on dropbox.com, but there's no special way to search for these files, I'm afraid.

I'll definitely pass your feedback along to our team about this, though, so thanks for taking the time to let us know about your experience.

J10000

Unfortunately, I don't seem to be able to search for these files on dropbox.com?

If I search for the single character for example entering a colon : in the search field it states 'no results found'...

How can we locate files even by the online search function that are unable to sync to user devices?

Thank you, we need to resolve this issue asap. Cheers

Hannah

Are these files synced to your account on dropbox.com, @J10000?

If so, you should be able to search for them using their actual names.

Otherwise, they can be renamed from the devices used to add them to the account.

J10000

They are synced on dropbox.com in the account with the issues, however you cannot search by character.

As per previous response:

If I search for the single character for example entering a colon : in the search field it states 'no results found'...

Therefore how will will analyse all files that have reserved characters if we cannot locate them via search in any way by the character in question?

Thank you

Jay

Hi @J10000, as the search for those characters isn't possible via the site, then you'll need to search for the files in Finder or Explorer manually and change the names from there.