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Forum Discussion
Cannot move shared folder if I am not the owner
I am trying to reorganize my dropbox because I literally have thousands of folders, and I need them to be more logically nested. This is no problem with shared folders that I own, but I can't move a...
Thanks, Hannah, for the reply. I get the same error both online and on my desktop, for all folders owned by someone else.
Hannah
Dropbox Staff
Dropbox StaffThanks, Claire.
I was able to investigate a bit, and it seems that this behavior is expected for shared folders that are not owned by the person trying to move them.
However, I have passed your comments along to our team and if you need anything else, please let us know.
I appreciate your reply Hannah, but I know that this is not correct. There are many comments on the dropbox forums from users who describe organizing their files by moving folders shared with them into other folders. Further, my whole team is able to take folders that I share with them and put them into another folder (in fact, this is the lynchpin of our whole sharing system, since I access to individual folders varies by person--I send everyone a screenshot of what their folder structure should look like and then they create a parent folder to hold all the folders I share with them with the name of the overall project, to ensure consistency across the team. No one else on my team is having this issue.
It is also completely unacceptable to suggest that it is reasonable functionality that any folder that someone shares with me should just live in my top level dropbox folder, with me unable to organize it anywhere else--it essentially means that I lose access to these files, as I have hundreds of thousands of files, so files that are not organized simply are not usable to me.
I have been using dropbox since the year it started, but these kind of functionality issues are becoming a dealbreaker for me. Almost twenty years down the road, there should be better file organization capabilities for a service whose sole purpose is to sync files. If this can't be properly addressed, I am going to have to look elsewhere for a Dropbox alternative (I already assigned someone on my team to research dropbox alternatives).
- Rich
Super User II
Hannah wrote:
... it seems that this behavior is expected for shared folders that are not owned by the person trying to move them.
When did this change, and more importantly, why? It was never like that before as I've moved many shared folders that are owned by other people into a common Shared folder in my Dropbox.
- Nancy
Hi everyone, hope you’re all doing well.
Here’s what I could find, after checking with the team, as well; to move a shared folder into another shared folder, you must own the file or folder you’re moving and have edit access to the destination folder (also, mentioned here).
However, if the folder you want to move and the destination folder are owned by the same individual, you should be able to move the folder with no issues.
- Hi Nancy,
I appreciate the response, but this issue has nothing to do with moving a shared folder into a shared folder. It is about moving a shared folder into another normal parent folder that is not shared with anyone. Dropbox should allow this, regardless of who owns the shared folder. But Dropbox gives me an error every time I try to do it.
