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:
- Unlink my DropBox (Prefs>Account>Unlink).
- Re-Link it and point to the new desired location.
- Pause the Sync
- Move all the DB files from the old location onto the new location, overwriting anything already there.
- Resume Syncing
- In my case this worked perfectly, and DB was "up to date" after a short while.
Dropbox Not Showing Sync Icons / Mac
- Make sure Dropbox is allowed in Security + Privacy → Finder and → Accessibility
- Quit Creative Cloud, Google Drive, Sync, OneDrive
- 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”).
- Make sure the file is downloaded and “offline”
- Make sure sync icons are good
- 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.