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installing and cloning new SSD drive

I currently have a old 1TB SSD Drive with the dropbox folder on it. I'd like to install a new 4 TB drive in my laptop and clone the old drive onto the new larger capacity SSD drive without having to resync and download all of the files again back into the cloned dropbox folder.

This seems like it should be a very normal thing but I can't seem to find enough information on this to make me a bit more comfortable. If I clone the drive completely, then swap them so the drive letter is restored, can I make that work? I found this on another post: "This doesn't work. When you boot up your new drive and start dropbox on it won't recognized the existing "dropbox" folder. It will force you to create a new dropbox folder and proceed to download the entire dropbox content from the cloud. pretty annoying"

Thanks in advance,

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Jay

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

It's likely that the same 'drive' won't be detected as the original drive the Dropbox folder was on originally.

This would result in the app trying to create another Dropbox folder, or renaming the older folder.

If you have any further queries, feel free to message back.

All comments

Jay

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

It's likely that the same 'drive' won't be detected as the original drive the Dropbox folder was on originally.

This would result in the app trying to create another Dropbox folder, or renaming the older folder.

If you have any further queries, feel free to message back.

TheEngineer

Thanks for the response. So it sounds like that it will need to download everything from dropbox. Are there instructions for doing this available. I.e. step one, remove the drop box folder, step two, remove your computer from the list of devices, etc,... any FAQ that I should refer to?

Many thanks!

Nancy

Hi from me as well, @TheEngineer!

If you end up having two Dropbox folders on your computer, what you can do instead is pause the syncing of your desktop app, manually move/copy your files from the old Dropbox folder to the new one and then, resume syncing once again.

This will cause the app to just reindex your files, instead of syncing everything from scratch.

Rich

If you end up having two Dropbox folders on your computer, what you can do instead is pause the syncing of your desktop app, manually move/copy your files from the old Dropbox folder to the new one and then, resume syncing once again.

@TheEngineer

That's the process I use for every rebuild and it works flawlessly (did it again just last week for about the 10th time). Just know that the re-indexing will take a while and Dropbox will still appear to be uploading and downloading, but it's just sending the comparison data and any differences it finds. Be patient and LET IT WORK. My Dropbox is about 185 GB and it took the better part of a day to re-index everything.

TheEngineer

thanks so much! that helps! Really appreciate this information!

TheEngineer

thanks for confirming the information above. that gives me a lot more comfort doing this!

DBuser555

Hello, I am late to this thread but I am having this same issue now, except that in my case, I didn't notice the problem for 2 weeks after cloning my D drive that now what should be a 118GB used in the new 1T cloned D drive, is that it's 732GB full! When I view it, it's massively Dropbox. (I ended Dropbox in the task manager as I couldn't find the stop sync, and now even though the files are clogging up the D drive, some files I can't access now - which seems like another problem, I only use Dropbox to put files there to save not sync if that makes sense). I keep all my files Local on the PC desktop, so it seems like something else changed too)

Can someone help me sort this out?
Thank you

DBuser555

P. S. The former/original d drive was 118GB full of data, that's all it should be now, give or take. Nothing else changes at all. I need to get Dropbox working correctly and get rid of all this ~600GB of duplicates.

Jay

Hi @DBuser555, thanks for the details, I'd recommend contacting the support team directly for them to investigate this matter in more detail on their end.