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Forum Discussion
move contents of dropbox to external hard drive
how do I move contents of dropbox
i.e my files and photos to an external hard drive
thanks folks
- Do you have the Dropbox client installed on your computer? If so, then your files will be syncing to your computer. They'll be in the Dropbox folder. Just copy them to your external drive like you would any other file.
If you're not already syncing your files and you just use the Dropbox website, then you'll need to download your files and save them to your external drive. The easier method would be to install the Dropbox client, let it sync all of your files to your computer, uninstall the client, and then move the Dropbox folder to your external drive. - [mod edit 2023, updated Help Center link]
I'd like to move items off of Dropbox completely and onto my external HD, bypassing my computer altogether.
How do I do this?
This is an old question and it wasn't really resolved to my satisfaction until I answered the question myself. My issue was, I wanted to download some very large files directly to a hard drive. On many sites, when you click on download, you get a navigation window asking you where you want to download the files to. Dropbox doesn't do that. It defaults to your downloads folder. Now, my computer's internal drive hasn't got much space left and it definitely can't handle downloading all the files I need to get onto the hard drive, so I need to bypass the computer altogether. The answer lies in determining what the default downloads folder is for your browser. It is usually the Downloads folder. But you can temporarily change that. Go into your browser's preferences (make sure your hard drive is connected and powered up) then change the default downloads folder to the hard drive. Now, any files or folders you click on in Dropbox will download directly to your hard drive. Once you're done, change your default downloads folder back to where you had it. Done-zo!
