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jflintwinch's avatar
jflintwinch
New member | Level 2
2 years ago

Paths to files after the forced move of the Dropbox folder (Mac OS)

After my Dropbox folder was moved to ~/Library/CloudStorage, I'm having trouble with applications that rely on having a physical working directory.

 

A lot of my R code is in Dropbox but the orginal file locations don't exist anymore now. However, if I set my working directory in R as ~/Library/CloudStorage/Dropbox/MyFolder, R can't find any files in that folder either. If I then run getwd() to get the current working directory, it says /Users/myusername. The same happens in Stata.

 

Similarly, when I try to compile a LaTeX file that is stored in Dropbox, it doesn't do anything presumably because it doesn't know what the actual working directory is, because the CloudStorage folder is pointing back to the virtual Dropbox location.

 

Any suggestions to fix this problem are appreciated.

  • I'm gonna answer my own question...

     

    It appears that after moving the Dropbox folder to `~/Library/CloudStorage`, one has to grant Full Disk Access (System Preferences > Privacy & Security > Full Disk Access) to applications accessing files in the Dropbox folder. After doing that for R, Stata, Texifier, and TeXShop, the above problems vanished.

  • Walter's avatar
    Walter
    Icon for Dropbox Staff rankDropbox Staff

    Hey jflintwinch, sorry to hear you're having issues with this.

     

    Can you please let us know your computer's exact OS and the status and version of the Dropbox desktop app that's installed there as shown in your menu bar?

     

    Are the issues you mentioned happening to online only files or is this affecting your available offline files as well?

     

    Keep us posted with your findings and we'll take it from there.

    • jflintwinch's avatar
      jflintwinch
      New member | Level 2

      I'm gonna answer my own question...

       

      It appears that after moving the Dropbox folder to `~/Library/CloudStorage`, one has to grant Full Disk Access (System Preferences > Privacy & Security > Full Disk Access) to applications accessing files in the Dropbox folder. After doing that for R, Stata, Texifier, and TeXShop, the above problems vanished.

      • Munish 's avatar
        Munish
        New member | Level 2

        Hi, 

        I am still facing the same problem even after applying the solution suggested, can you help me with it. 

        Thanks!