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
Can you remove the space in the dropbox folder name ("Dropbox (Company-Name)")?
I'm using my companies business dropbox account. And it created a folder called "Dropbox (my companies name here)".
Is there a way to remove the space between "Dropbox" and "("? I don't want to ha...
Hi all,
Unfortunately, it's not possible to change the name of Dropbox folder, as many of you have discovered.
If you are using it for scripts then the best thing would firstly to parse the info.json and grab the path from there. The JSON is located:
Mac/Linux:
~/.dropbox/info.json
Windows will be one of these two paths:
%APPDATA%\Dropbox\info.json
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Dropbox\info.json
I say this as if you were to move your Dropbox folder at anytime then this would, of course, break any paths that explicitly referenced an exact folder path.
On a side note, spaces within file paths shouldn't cause issues within scripts, it's fairly normal to have some spaces in there, just ensure your path string is correctly formatted and your script should be fine.
Ross_S
Dropbox Staff
Dropbox StaffHi all,
Unfortunately, it's not possible to change the name of Dropbox folder, as many of you have discovered.
If you are using it for scripts then the best thing would firstly to parse the info.json and grab the path from there. The JSON is located:
Mac/Linux:
~/.dropbox/info.json
Windows will be one of these two paths:
%APPDATA%\Dropbox\info.json
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Dropbox\info.json
I say this as if you were to move your Dropbox folder at anytime then this would, of course, break any paths that explicitly referenced an exact folder path.
On a side note, spaces within file paths shouldn't cause issues within scripts, it's fairly normal to have some spaces in there, just ensure your path string is correctly formatted and your script should be fine.
The “fix” there does not help because it is not my script, but whole programs that I did not write that are now broken. We are not requesting a “new” feature. Dropbox used to work perfectly well , and then changed things with bad filenames. I can’t have the parentheses in the names either—it is not just the space. You keep adding new features I have no use of, but never fix what you broke. This has been going on a long time now.
@Ross_S: I don't understand how this can be marked as solved! This is just a disgrace.
First of all, what is this info.json file? How should I use that? This is just silly.
The solution seems to imply that Dropbox users should fix the software they "use," even if they didn't write it themselves, or may not even have access to the source code, let alone abilities to fix the problem.
This naming issue has been a constant source of so many problems since I migrated my professional account to my company's account some 8 months ago. It is often a silent problem too. Things just don't work as they used to, and you spend hours trying to figure out what the problem is. My latest problem was with a VSCode extension; the problem will (eventually) be fixed upstream, but I've already wasted 4 hours of my life that I'll not be getting back! Before that I spent weeks debugging a syncing problem that was related to this, after following a symlink suggestion from Dropbox support.
@Ross_S: Can you please unmark this as solved, because it isn't. Furthermore, please explain in a pinned message why this isn't solved already; what's the problem with helping legacy software live longer? And please give a timeframe for when it will be solved.
I agree that the problem has not been solved, but indeed, there has been a couple of workarounds posted. Dropbox has already, by their silence over the YEARS that this has been an issue, determined that this will never be "solved" to our satisfaction. That's why I don't use Dropbox Business, and never will as long as they continue to ignore this major problem. My guess is there are enough people who don't use legacy software and therefore Dropbox has determined that this is not a problem that has to be solved.
Dropbox is not alone in ignoring major bugs. There are some bugs in Microsoft Word that have been there since 2007. More than 10 years and dozens of version since then, and they've never bothered to fix these particular bugs. Technology companies obviously have to determine which features are important to the users, and unfortunately, Dropbox has determined that this bug is not important to most users. So I wouldn't expect a fix anytime soon. At this point, it's not even on the list of bugs they are intending to fix. My advice? Stick with the personal version of the software and skip the business version. You get many of the same benefits without the bugs. Luckily, they were very nice in helping me switch back to my personal version because I was nervous about losing my files when it switched back. I didn't lose anything, and have been using the personal version with about 15 different teams of people without any problems at all.
I still prefer Dropbox over GoogleDrive, iCloud, and OneDrive (though that may change as Dropbox appears to be trying to work more like these other cloud services which "take over" your system and won't stop bugging you about putting all your files up on the cloud drive. I prefer to manage my clouds (I use them all for different teams) as just a part of my file system, keeping my 10 TB hard drive as the major source for all my files.
@cjrhoads thanks for the advice. I didn't read the entire thread, so I'm sure there are some workarounds for specific problems, but the pinned solution was definitely not a solution. I'm curious about the workarounds, but don't have time now to read it all. Needless to say, my first attempt at a workaround, as I mentioned in passing in the first message, was a major disaster that took me weeks to debug. Essentially, Dropbox support recommended that I could simply move (rename) my "Dropbox (Team UiS)" folder to "Dropbox" folder, and symlink in the reverse direction. This resulted in stopped syncing. Restarting the client would sometimes fix the problem temporarily, but it kept stopping to sync. It took some time before I discovered this, and since this was based on advise from Dropbox support, it took me a while to realize the problem... You don't expect support to give such a specific solution, and then it turns out to be flawed advise.
I never wanted to switch to business in the first place, but was "force" to switch because of company policy to get reimbursed for the expense.
I also prefer Dropbox over the others, but I've been watching with horror the bloated feature set that has come to Dropbox these last few years, including smart syncing, which is definitely not smart... Or rather, after the switch to Dropbox Business I had smart sync disabled, yet I had to force sync all my files manually on one of my machines.
The response: "If you are using it for scripts then the best thing would firstly to parse the info.json and grab the path from there. The JSON is located: “ may work for some people, but is completely useless for me. Many programs I use are broken because of this dropbox “feature” . I have wasted untold hours because of this. There should not only be no space, there should be no parentheses, and the user should have the option of choosing the directory name altogether.
- Ross_S
For those having issue performing a specific routing task:
If you were to outline what you are doing, and the error you are hitting, then the community here may be able to help you resolve the issue. The space shouldn't stop you performing the task you are doing.
Again I would advise; there is a space in our folder name, but this is incredibly standard in computing and in no way unusual.
I use prebuilt linux programs on my mac, not scripts or codes I can edit. They use for example pulldown menus with file choosers. These only work with legal linux directory and filenames. Although there is a way to quote around spaces and odd-characters in a linux shell, it is not necessarily so inside a widget or program. So all of these codes are broken. I can use them by typing in the whole huge directory path for every single file I want to open, which takes minutes and is mistake prone, compared with simply clicking, which is the intent. This is ALL because dropbox has illegal directory names at the top level that CANNOT be changed by the user. This is unacceptible. I care NOTHING about all your new features which I do not use. I simply would like basic clean operations, which is not there. Also a symbolic links also do not work in this context for me.
Ross S.
This is a tone deaf response. Your users are telling you they are having problems and you are basically telling them it is their part they are having problems.
Syncing software is a incredibly useful thing for teams from different companies workign together but it is vitally important to workflows that the naimg paths be the same on both ends. In my case all of my paths are broken because Dropbox puts our company name in the path and won't let me alter it. This means that my path names are different than my consutants. Which means if I need to modify any files I have to spend time repathing items. It is frustrating and make DB less useful but unfortunatly DB is king right now so we can easily move to another syncing app that allows the paths to remain unbroken.
Look, do you have any developers on your staff who could talk to you about what developers do? There are a bunch of UNIX-based tools that do not cope well with pathnames containing blanks. What's more, having been a developer for nigh on to 50 years, I am utterly certain that there is somewhere in your code that sets up these paths and that could be changed to give more flexibility, probably -- if it was at all competently designed and coded -- by changing just a few lines of code.
I'm paying for a terabyte of storage because I use my Dropbox for all my working files. now I can't. I am not pleased, and peeing on my leg and telling me it's rain isn't going to make it better.
- You’ve mark this as solBed. It’s not solved. What you’ve done is sad you can’t be bothered to fix a trivial issue that’s causing trouble for customers.
I cant belive in this!!! i just moved to dropbox business and all my stuff stopped work!!!!
Same problem here. I am using some old script for molecular simulation and they cannot handle file path with "()"
I want changed my phone
The space is a requirement for Dropbox's naming convention. If you have ever used another online storage service, you may know that some file names are not allowed to contain spaces. Dropbox cannot allow the space to create confusion between different files because this would cause them to be saved differently than intended. So yes, you can rename your files accordingly without affecting their contents. You should probably do so anyway!
The space is MOST DEFINITELY not a required thing, i have a dropbox install folder on several servers I've been dragging along that still uses C/D:\Dropbox, and i have held on to it for YEARS, everything works great, so its not a technical thing, its a setting on the client somewhere, dumbest thing I've ever seen.
Just let us edit the **bleep** thing and get over it, its clearly just a setting somewhere, if you don't want to add support for it and waste time via UI at least make a dropboxfolder.override file somewhere where we add there what folder we want dropbox to be at and it will use that and done.
Stop this madness please, its been years.
We know doing stuff takes time, but allowing a variable change in the software cannot possibly take 6 years guys
Allowing the “command line delimiter character” in filenames pretty much breaks using the command line. Which means automation is broken. Dropbox may or may not have known this (their engineers were once pretty smart, obviously, given how well Dropbox’s basic functionality works), but clearly, today, they do not care about automation.
They do not care if we can use Dropbox in a production workflow. I don’t know what they do care about, but clearly not people who would try to use Dropbox to, you know, get work done.
Instead we get absurdities like “paper”. And, given how they’ve totally screwed Mac users and our ability to keep the OS up to date, who in their right mind would trust them with a password?
