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Looking for a way, as admin to a shared folder which contains sub-folders, to keep other team members from accidentally moving those sub-folders. Part of it is education: novices do not grasp that by moving a folder to their desktop (for whatever reason) they are moving it out of DB and visibility to the rest of the team. This has occurred a few times, and as the team grows, it would be better if admin could lock a folder's POSITION. Probably would be a benefit to keep the folders from being renamed, but that is less likely to happen. Users should still be able to freely work with and move files as needed within the locked-position folders. Maybe there is a way to do this that I'm not aware of. Third party folder manager (those I reviewed are focused on encrypting, password protecting and/or hiding folders)? Any advice would be appreciated.
Any news on this topic?
We've had someone accidentally rename and delete a shared folder and now all people using this folder have to Re-Sync this folder which is almost a terabyte big!
There should be an option to share folders but not renaming / deleting the folder itself. Dropbox people, as it is almost impossible to contact you, maybe you could reply to this thread....
Thanks!
Any more information on this? This is a real flaw in the system.
This is a big problem for my team, as well. Any help in locking folder locations would be great!
Is there a way to prevent users from moving a specific folder, or lock a folder in its current position? The user should still be able to edit its contents though.
Or, prevent a user from being able to delete a specific folder while still being able to edit its contents.
I was just looking to see if this was possible...have had a few instances over the past month alone where entire folders with a LOT of contents were 'accidently' moved elsewhere and then when moved back EVERYTHING had to reload/sync back in place for each member using the folders, which takes a very long time and is a huge hassle when trying to get proofs across to each other in a hurry...we ended up having to just email each proof etc. Yesterday it happened on print day 2 hours before deadline which just caused a whole lot of chaos, especially when some of the team members computers take half a day to re-sync!
Sorry, long blurb...but thanks for posting this so hopefully this may become an option!- Fiona
Dropbox Staff
Hello marauder28!
Thanks for joining our Community!
I understand you would like to have additional settings to prevent the movement of folders from members without removing their permissions to edit. This option is not available at the time. But it is a very good feature request and I will report it! :dividers:
I would like to point out that moving shared folders only reflects for the user moving them when sharing is not in a team folder. The other members of the folder would still see the shared folder in the original location. This gives everyone the ability to organise their content as they wish.
Moving folders in a Team folder, allows the members of the team folder to see the movement, if the destination location of the directory is also inside the Team space.
Note: Only the Admin can move a folder, completely out of a Team space.
Finally, as described by MissT5, when someone moves a folder, the system takes time to transfer all the files to the new filepath you chose. If you move it back or elsewhere the system would again take time to sync the changes. :arrows_counterclockwise:
Again thank you for the feature request! :nerd:
Hello and thank you for the clarifications. We are enterprise users who use Team spaces extensively to collaborate. So, a feature like this is very, very, very important.
We recently had an incident where a user inadvertantly moved a large folder containing lots of large subfolders on his dropbox mobile app at the end of the day and left on vacation.
Other users still working started to see files and folders go missing. Some users saw partial syncs of the move in another folder and started moving things around to try and fix it. It became a mess and we needed to get the Restoration team involved. This took an entire weekend and a few days to get resolved.
And as you mentioned to MissT5, it takes time for the system to sync the changes. That's a huge waste of time, which is why this feature is so badly needed.
Same problem. It's a huge issue for us. Or even a user who is just navigating within the folder structure and accidentally moves a major folder into another major folder. By the time they cut and paste the folder back to fix the problem (or reverse the event online), the change has started syncing across our user base and can take a lot of bandwidth/time to recover. This is exacerbated by the fact that a number of our users are in remote Africa with limited bandwidth.
I still need users with full editing rights, I just want to lock the position of major folders in our Dropbox root so they can't be moved.
I'm considering using Dropbox. However, just reading David G.'s post really scares me a lot. I'm wondering if I shared a photo, for example photos of my ancestors, with a cousin, could he accidentally remove the whole folder from my Dropbox & put it on his computer? I DEFINITELY don't want to lose any info due to sharing.
Susan,
You definitely WOULD NOT lose anything. In fact, that's the beauty of Dropbox. You could either lock the folder so that your cousin could only save a separate copy of the folder contents, and you'd always have the option of easily recovering data that has been removed using Dropbox online.
This comment is specific to people moving things around within a complex folder structure set up for an organization with many users.
In an attempt to upload a file to an unsynced folder, I moved one our clients folder (~350gb). Now, we're all stuck in the mud waiting for this to resync, and we've paused all computer except for mine while it resets to make sure there is not conflicting data.
Dropbox just straight up wiped it and started over, and I was hoping it would just see the same folders and not delete and re-download, but apparently not.
There needs to be a dialog box or some sort of warning at the very least, but I think admins locking the file would be the best option.
Part of our team is proposing to move to a different system because too often somone moves their finger across the mouse and unknowlingly picks up a large folder and drops it somewhere. We need to be able to lock folder locations as we have a structured directory.
Big issue here too. Hoping for news on this one!
