How To Change the Dropbox Folder Location
Moving or changing the location of the Dropbox folder can be very handy at times. Recently I bought a new External USB drive so I could move all my backup data including my Dropbox folder to it. Here’s how the step-by-step process works.
First, right-click your Dropbox icon in the system tray and click Preferences.
Click the Advanced tab and click the Move button next to the location of the folder.
Choose a new folder or drive location for your folder. In my example I chose my brand new External Drive. Click OK when done.
Using an external drive makes your Dropbox data even more portable!
You’ll be asked to confirm the new location.
In my example, moving the folder to a new drive required the client to copy all the data over. It took about 30 minutes to finish. If you are just moving the folder to another folder on the same drive however, the move should be close to instantaneous.
Do you have a groovy Dropbox tip? Tell us about it in the comments and if it’s great I’ll write it up and preview it here on gP!
5 Comments
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Daniel
Really useful. Nice
Bogdan Bele
Thanks!
Jason
For some reason mine is saying the folder or files are in use. Is there any way to tell which ones are because I’m not trying to access anything to move them.
Bogdan Bele
Are you running Portable Apps from the Dropbox folder? Because if you are and you have something like Firefox running, it will write to it most of the times.
But you could just open the folder and see which one of the folders has the sync sign next to it (the blue one).
Another good idea would probably be to restart Windows, wait for everything to sync and then try moving it.
PatD
I tried that and it allowed me to change from D:My Dropbox to D:My DropboxDropbox.
I need to change the name to match my other computer so the browser links/sync would work.