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Copy large dropbox to new drive on MacOS Sonoma

I have my dropbox on an SMR external drive on MacOS Sonoma. I want to move it to my new SSD drive. But the dropbox is very large so many of the folders are online only. Which means they show up as 0 bytes on MacOS because of the dropbox bug that has been there for years. There a millions of files, and about 3 TB of data.

How can I copy over the dropbox to the new SSD drive? How do I avoid Dropbox app on desktop trying to sync multiple times during this process?

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Jay

Hi @mgw1, thanks for bringing this to our attention.

Could you clarify what you mean by having 3 TB of files, but that they take up 0 bytes of space?

Is the SSD drive an internal or external drive on your machine?

This will help me to assist further.

mgw1

Many of the files are online only, so they appear to be 0 bytes to MacOS. So if I just copy, they will be copied as 0 bytes to the SSD instead of pulling down from the cloud during the copy, like Google Drive does.

Jay

Okay, so just to clarify, do you want to relocate your Dropbox folder to another SSD drive?

Do you want the files to be made available offline in order to download them, or keep them as online-only files?

mgw1

There is one SMR drive with the Dropbox. Many files are marked online only. Some folders are marked not to be synced with selective sync. I want to have all the folders and all the files on the SSD drive. It is ok if i relocate the Dropbox, or if the SSD contains copies of every file.

Walter

In that case, would moving your Dropbox folder to the new drive work for you or you'd like a copy instead @mgw1?

You should also be able to change your sync settings from the app's preferences if needed.