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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: 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.
Yes, I completely agree with you. I also am eyeing the increasing bloatware that Dropbox is trying to force on us. As I said, they are trying to match the features of the other clouds, but for people like me, that's why I LIKED dropbox. It was simple and easy for what I needed to do. But the model these days seems to be for people to put tons of stuff on the cloud (paying for the space, of course) and not putting anything local on their hard drives. Computers these days are being sold with such little hard drive space that people are being forced to do it that way - but what a waste of money!!!
And it is horrible that technical support led you astray, but I can't say I'm surprised. Most of the time I know much more about the software than the technical support people.
And if you go back to the beginning of this thread, you will see that it's been around for years and years, and that for people like me, none of the workarounds worked. That's why I'm not using Dropbox Business.
At any rate - good luck!!!
Peace
CJ
