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Dropbox Troubleshooting & Tips

Re-Syncing a Drive

For moving an external hard drive Dropbox to a new computer without (re)downloading.

Dropbox has a guide for this here. But I've had to do this so many times that I've re-written it to be a bit more digestible. 

Basically, on the new computer or in the new location that you want DropBox (DB) to put the newDB folder: 

  • Start a DropBox Sync from scratch to the new location, so that DB actually starts downloading all the online files to the new location.
  • Pause the Sync, to stop the downloads. 
  • Copy your existing DB files into the new location (overwrite anything that was just downloaded). 
  • Resume Syncing - DB will first check the DB folder, be astounded to find all the files magically there, and proceed to only sync the latest updates, if any.

To clarify how to start a DB sync from scratch in a new location (for example, in the event of already having all the files on a hard drive but in a different location, like myself & the OP), I had to actually:

Dropbox Not Showing Sync Icons / Mac

  1. Make sure Dropbox is allowed in Security + Privacy → Finder and → Accessibility
  2. Quit Creative Cloud, Google Drive, Sync, OneDrive
  3. Quit DropBox and relaunch it

Dropbox “MooV” Error

This is an error when After Effects or Premiere tries to load a file from a cloud service and the file exists in the directory, but it isn’t downloaded (eg “0 Bytes”). 

  1. Make sure the file is downloaded and “offline”
  2. Make sure sync icons are good
  3. Make sure there isn’t some bugged cache thing happening, duplicate the file to the desktop and import from there. If it works, your file is bugged - dupe it and rename it in the directory you want it to be in. So annoying. 

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