Two Dropbox folders after migration from old Mac to new

Hey Paul D.4, hope you don’t mind me jump in. 

What you mention towards the end is correct; when using the desktop app on your computer, Dropbox also wants to make sure that your files won’t affect your hard drive space too much, so the files may be set to be online-only. When setting up the Dropbox app on your new device, do you remember if you set your files to be online-only or available offline? 

Even if your files are online-only at the moment (indicated by the grey cloud icon you see next to them), you can still make them available offline by selecting them, right-clicking on them and choosing “Make available offline”. Can you please try this and let me know what happens then?

Finally, you can attach a screenshot on the forum by clicking on the following button: 

Thanks, Nancy, I really feel like we're getting somewhere. I never made a selection of online-only that I'm aware of. I was really hoping that after the MacBook migration DropBox would behave the way it always did (which is to store locally). So what I have now on the new MB is a faithful copy of the original DB ƒ made during the migration, retaining all the correct modification dates but sadly that is not what got connected to the DB cloud for syncing - don’t know why. (By the way on the old MacBook, the DB folder was named “DropBox personal”). Sadly, post-migration the folder that is connected to the DB cloud, etc., is called plain "DropBox” and almost all the modification dates are the same (ugh!), almost all have the little cloud icon. In summary I do not trust this online-only folder and would like to override / disable this being the one that dynamically syncs and assign that privilege or capacity to “DropBox Personal” that got left out in the cold. Does this make sense?

Thanks,

Paul

Hey Paul! Yes, I believe I understand what you’re trying to achieve. 

Next thing I’d like us to check is the default setting for syncing new files on your Dropbox app and make sure it’s set to “available offline” instead of “online-only”. Please follow these steps to do this. 

As for the old Dropbox folder with the correct modification dates, I’d like us to do a little test first. What I want you to do is pause the app’s syncing, copy a file or two from your old Dropbox folder to the new one, resume the app’s syncing and see if the modification date is preserved on the app and the website.

Also, what syncing icon do you see next to these files after that? Is it a green checkmark or a grey cloud icon again?

Let me know once you have more details.

Thanks Nancy, as I drill into this I have a couple of things to report - first I hadn't been looking at my old MacBook lately but I noticed that activity on the new MacBook is getting populated and synced over to the original Legacy “dropbox personal" on my old MacBook. I did not realize that was the case.

The other revelation is that to my surprise the old MacBook dropbox preference was set to online-only which baffles me because right now all the contents of that dropbox folder before migration day all have green check boxes (as well as valid mod. dates), which is what I've always remembered as the status quo. The little cloud icons were only something I noticed after working with the new MacBook’s DropBox.

The next revelation is as I review the contents of the new dropbox on the new Mac I see that the files seem to retain their original date even though they have cloud icons next to them and it's the *folders* that are all September 24 (the day of the migration).

So in light of this file/folder discrepancy I conducted your test on a folder instead of a file because it's the folders that all are stuck with the September 24 date. I followed your instructions paused sync, copied the folder into the active dropbox on the new MacBook, it retained its original modification date before & after I resumed sync and has a green checkbox next to it. However the other folders have the cloud icon and are stuck with September 24.

btw I only work with the website in emergencies to access something when I'm on the road away from my MacBook. I say that because in the directory list the column for modify doesn't show anything. It's only when I select the folder and do "get info" I see the date, and yes, it's the original modified date.Thanks very much for your help, what should we do next?

Paul

Thanks for giving that a go, Paul! If the experiment we did worked, you can go ahead and do the same thing for the rest of your folders. Meaning, you can copy them over to your new Dropbox folder with the same steps you followed previously; this way, you should be seeing the folders with the correct modification dates that you previously did.

Let me know if you face any trouble along the way though.

I am wondering if it would be simpler to switch my preference to "available off-line" to make the folder modification dates reflect the original reality instead of everything being September 24? I'm making a back up of the dropbox folder contents and will probably give this a try.

By the way, I realize by making a copy to an external drive all the cloud files have to populate locally in order to be copied and I'm wondering if they will remain local once the completes.

Keep in mind the instructions you gave me for the test omitted a step I had to take, which was to quarantine the cloud only folders with the bad dates before copying from the off-line dropbox folder so there would be no overwriting happening. If I repeat the test we did it would be incremental and pretty time-consuming.

You can definitely try this as a test, before following the previous steps. 

Now, if you make your files available offline, they should remain as such even after they’ve been copied to your external hard drive (given that you also have enough space on your local hard drive).

I've had a degree of success, pausing DropBox sync on my two MacBooks removing folders that were imprinted with false modified dates by DropBox replacing them with folders from the duplicate dropbox folder that was off-line that had correct modified dates (named DropBox personal) and the correct dates seem to stick.

This shows some promise, but I feel at every turn I'm being undermined by DropBox imposing new ‘last modified’ dates on its own on folders that were not part of this replacement-fix experiment.  By this I mean when I sort by date-modified, I see that dozens of folders I have not used in months have been given recently modified dates (post that 9/24 migration date). This is really a nightmare what is going on? This never used to happen on the old MacBook. Being able to sort by last modified date is so fundamental to my workflow and at every turn, it seems like DropBox is undoing the correct modified dates and updating it with a more recent date despite the *complete lack of activity on said folder.*

I don't know if this has any bearing, but since the new MacBook has more storage, I've opted to enable the preference "available off-line" thinking that would help the situation of files behaving like normal local files and simply getting mirrored to the cloud and other devices.

Even though files are getting populated to my old MacBook, there are issues there related to modify dates, but I'll save that for another time as what I've described above is really the central and fundamental problem. Thanks in advance for any help.

Paul

Sure would like some help with this, Nancy are you there?

Hi Paul D.4, currently, there aren't any further steps we can try in relation to the modification dates for folders on your device. 

In general, folders do not contain modification dates, as they are only directories containing files, and no actual data in the 'folder item' itself. The OS would be the one to determine when a folder is considered to be 'modified'. 

This behavior can be duplicated when moving files to or from an external drive, like in this Apple Support thread. There are many other threads on that site that indicate similar issues with the modification date of folders, or other random behavior, however, files tend to keep their correct dates.