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
"Sorry we couldn't find File ABC" upon cut/paste to different folder
I use Dropbox desktop and this appears to sync fine. However I am encountering an issue when I move a file.
For example, if I move a file into a different folder, and then try to re-open the file,...
The issue you're experiencing may be due to a limitation of the applications that you're using to open or save the files in question OferL - this is something compeletely out of our control. In short, there are files that your applications can't process correctly because they have file paths that are too long.
This behavior is present if there are more than 255 characters in the entire file path. This means from the C:\ all the way to the extension of a file.
As an example if you had a test.txt file in your Dropbox that had the following path:
C:\Users\OferL\My Documents\Dropbox\test.txt
This file would have a path that is 47 characters long while if you moved the same file to your desktop directly as you mentioned you'd be immediately reducing its filepath to fewer characters as it would result to something like:
C:\Users\OferL\test.txt
Based on your example now, when you move this copy to your desktop as you said, you're immediately reducing the number of characters on the filepath and this is why you're able to open it without issues.
Keep in mind that our desktop application can read and write to locations that are longer than 255 characters, which means that files will sync to and from those locations, however, the applications used to open or save said files (e.g. Word, Notepad, Excel, Etc.) might not support reading from or writing to these locations with long file paths and may show error messages when trying to open, save or edit them. This is out of our control since the application developers would have to add support for long paths to resolve the issue.
You should be able to resolve the issues with your applications processing these files by simply renaming the file to a shorter name, renaming a folder to a shorter name, or reducing the number of sub-folders.
I hope this clarify matters to you and please let me know if there's anything else I can help with.
Richard P.
Super User alumni
Super User alumniIts likely to be an Excel issue, as googling "excel couldnt find file" shows several potential issues that throw that error message. Its quite common if you have linked documents or code in an Excel file and you move one of the files from its expected location.
Richard P. wrote:Its likely to be an Excel issue, as googling "excel couldnt find file" shows several potential issues that throw that error message. Its quite common if you have linked documents or code in an Excel file and you move one of the files from its expected location.
Yes thanks but neither of your responses are any use whatsoever - can you please get someone on the case that knows what they're doing!
"It's quite common" -I've never experienced it and it only happens with Dropbox, it doesn't happen on OneDrive or Explorer any other file sharing application!
There are multiple people that are very frustrated by the issue so please investigate and work out what is wrong with your application. I'm paying an annual fee fr a service and this goes a long way short of my expectations!
