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Forum Discussion
asakul
4 years agoHelpful | Level 6
Dropbox user folder "My Mac (User Name)" hidden in finder
I recently had to restore my Mac from Time Machine, and for some reason after doing this, the main dropbox folder (with desktop, documents, downloads, etc) is now hidden in finder. This is also keepi...
Walter
4 years agoDropbox Staff
Hey asakul; welcome to our Community and happy Monday!
I'm sorry to hear you're having issues with the computer backup feature; let's have a look into this.
To be honest, I'm assuming that this could have been caused by the Time Machine feature, but let's make sure about it first.
Can you please take a look at your account's linked devices and let me know if the one you're using is showing twice there?
Any additional information is more than welcome!
I'm sorry to hear you're having issues with the computer backup feature; let's have a look into this.
To be honest, I'm assuming that this could have been caused by the Time Machine feature, but let's make sure about it first.
Can you please take a look at your account's linked devices and let me know if the one you're using is showing twice there?
Any additional information is more than welcome!
- asakul4 years agoHelpful | Level 6
Hi Walter! Thanks and happy Monday to you as well.
I am using two different computers to link files between them (a desktop at work and my personal laptop), but each one only shows up once in that list. But notably, the "My Mac" folder on my work desktop is visible, so you may be right that it had something to do with Time Machine.
I did try and reinstall the dropbox app, but that didn't change anything either.
I was also able to restore the backup capability of the downloads and desktop folders. To do this I went to their pinned locations on the sidebar of Finder and chose "show parent folder". This led me to their dropbox location. From there I copied the entire folder back to it's location on my hard drive, and this allowed me to back up these two folders. It seems dropbox was looking back to that location to try and back up? The original backup error message was something like "the folder isn't in its original location".
I haven't done the same with my documents folder, because I probably have 700-1000gb of data, and not all of it is stored locally (and can't be since my hard drive isn't big enough). Anyway, I don't want to risk anything because my files are pretty sensitive.
When I copied those two main folders (desktop and downloads) it also duplicated all of the files in those folders – so there would be "FileA.jpg" and "FileA (New).jpg". This is obviously easier to manage when it's 5-10 files on my desktop versus 100,000 in my documents folder...
The only other bit of info I have is that I updated a bunch of folders on my work computer on Friday, and only about 30% of the changes happened that night – the rest didn't happen until Sunday afternoon. That may be more of a cache issue than anything though it sounds like?
Thanks for your help!
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