You might see that the Dropbox Community team have been busy working on some major updates to the Community itself! So, here is some info on what’s changed, what’s staying the same and what you can expect from the Dropbox Community overall.

Forum Discussion

tiinasarlin's avatar
tiinasarlin
Explorer | Level 4
4 years ago

change online only to local sync

A suggested solution for changing online only files to local cync was to "sync your files locally (on the top folder level)" .  This is not very helpful, because the problem is how to sync files loca...
Desktop
Sync
  • Hannah's avatar
    Hannah
    4 years ago

    Thanks for the update, Tiina!

    Selective sync is a feature that helps remove entire folders from your Dropbox folder, to save up hard drive space. Is it possible that you used it before to remove these folders?

    If that's the case, you can use the steps in the hyperlinked article, to add them back.

    Let me know if that helped!

     

    Mod note: updated link in post [last update 2023]

Hannah's avatar
Hannah
Icon for Dropbox Staff rankDropbox Staff
Hey tiinasarlin, thanks for posting!

To switch online-only files back to local, you'll need to control/right click on them from the Dropbox folder on your computer, click "Smart sync" and then "Local".

Can you clarify something for me, though? You said that the files don't show up in the Dropbox desktop app. Were they maybe selectively unsynced?

Let me know what you find!
tiinasarlin's avatar
tiinasarlin
Explorer | Level 4
4 years ago
Thanks, but since the files are not visible in the desktop app, I find it difficult to right-click them. The highest level dropbox-symbol is visible and right-clicked to "local" about 100 times. Only a few of the files under it are present locally on my computer.

I can't tell the difference between files being selective or smart (not) synced. Are there different ways to make them appear?
/tiina

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