Can you remove the space in the dropbox folder name ("Dropbox (Company-Name)")?

[Vincent M.9]

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 have a space in the path. So the folder name will become "Dropbox-Company" or "Dropbox_Company" or something, but not space.

It seems impossible.

[Eric Lam]

I want changed my phone 

[meling]

@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.

[cjrhoads]

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. 

[meling]

@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.

[cjrhoads]

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

[Shelton K.]

I recommend creating a hard link instead of a symbolic link. Unfortunately, a lot of apps still choke on symlinks. 

ln "~/Your Company Name Dropbox" ~/Dropbox

[Erseclowars]

The space is a requirement for Dropbox's naming convention. If you have ever used another online storage service, you may know that some file names are not allowed to contain spaces. Dropbox cannot allow the space to create confusion between different files because this would cause them to be saved differently than intended. So yes, you can rename your files accordingly without affecting their contents. You should probably do so anyway!

[XionicFire]

The space is MOST DEFINITELY not a required thing, i have a dropbox install folder on several servers I've been dragging along that still uses C/D:\Dropbox, and i have held on to it for YEARS, everything works great, so its not a technical thing, its a setting on the client somewhere, dumbest thing I've ever seen.

Just let us edit the **bleep** thing and get over it, its clearly just a setting somewhere, if you don't want to add support for it and waste time via UI at least make a dropboxfolder.override file somewhere where we add there what folder we want dropbox to be at and it will use that and done.

Stop this madness please, its been years.

We know doing stuff takes time, but allowing a variable change in the software cannot possibly take 6 years guys

[bill-1234]

Allowing the “command line delimiter character” in filenames pretty much breaks using the command line. Which means automation is broken. Dropbox may or may not have known this (their engineers were once pretty smart, obviously, given how well Dropbox’s basic functionality works), but clearly, today, they do not care about automation.

They do not care if we can use Dropbox in a production workflow. I don’t know what they do care about, but clearly not people who would try to use Dropbox to, you know, get work done.

Instead we get absurdities like “paper”. And, given how they’ve totally screwed Mac users and our ability to keep the OS up to date, who in their right  mind would trust them with a password?

[XionicFire]

Ditto on the "Paper"

We use Dropbox as a basically backbone of the business, nothing gets done in this company if its not, automatically and transparently for the user, uploaded to Dropbox, most of our users don't even know what the icon is or what it does, its mandatory install on every one of our company machines, because it lets us, the sysadmins of the world (you know the guys who actually keep stuff working for everyone else every day), revert "user stupidity" errors like "whoops! I'm sorry I deleted the entire accounting folder, my bad! can you fix it?" and other such nightmares with a single click and in a few minutes, which at least for me, and our company, is basically a showstopper not to have.

I do not want my users messing with the Dropbox software or its settings, I do not want them to even know its there, so features like "Paper" don't help, not to mention they just don't work, when people have tried them they just inundate our support call center with stupid calls about why such and such new Dropbox "feature" is not working, I thank Dropbox they have now given us the option to turn off all this nonsense to our users, if I wanted something like "paper" id just upgrade our already existing office 365 subscriptions and use Office Online + OneDrive, which, you know... actually works....

Dear Dropbox, we all know you want to compete with Office and OneDrive, don't.. you are not OneDrive, you are BETTER than OneDrive, OneDrive is a stupid users dream come true but the IT departments nightmare, Dropbox had been and for the most part (with some hacks and tweaks) a "no nonsense" transparent sync and backup solution that works well over the entire company.

Please stay that, do not try to be OneDrive, we have OneDrive, we hate it, we only turn it on for a user if its absolutely necessary because of all the nightmares it causes, whereas Dropbox is mandatory install on every PC and every user in the company no exceptions.

I will say it again, YOU ARE NOT ONEDRIVE, if you insist on going the OneDrive route because some marketer up top tells you that's where the money is I'm going to let you in on a little secret those guys don't know/don't get, if you turn into OneDrive, we will just bite the bullet and switch to OneDrive, we hate it, its absolute garbage, but if were forced to pick some third party OneDrive wannabe over REAL OneDrive with the Active directory and Azure Domain security that actually works, we will pick that, we will grumble, complain and moan every day for the entire 3 months it will take to migrate everything to Microsoft and never look back, because OneDrive works, its just absolute crap, Its 10x more work for us to do the same thing than Dropbox does, but it works, not to mention Microsoft uses the same servers for all its services, so we cannot separate OneDrive traffic from, you know.. teams video conferencing, which breaks everything, and Microsoft has no interest in fixing it, with Dropbox we can route Dropbox heavy traffic out one internet WAN, and the video chat on another, preserving quality of service for our users, but that is a story for another time....

So please, we know you think its a good idea to turn into your competitors, but in this case its not, just do what you are the king at, transparent, seamless, awesome, invisible, automation friendly, no one knows its there but the sysadmin, sync and backup solution for our entire company, and we will be here forever. 

I swear some of our users just think the "Share" button on their files is part of the operating system in the computer, they have never understood how or why it works, keep it that way!

I hope this has helped explain why were frustrated with all your changes and why you don't seem to understand why we don't want "new cool features!"

PS. IMHO you should just make 2 versions of Dropbox, your "OneDrive" style one, which, by all means have fun with it and sell it to whom ever will buy it, and a "Engineering IT" version, which lets us change and tweak everything as we need it, it doesn't have any of the "cool features" the cool kids want but will do the job we need it to do, you do that, I can guarantee you we will never go anywhere and we will even make it mandatory to have this Dropbox on all machines, even kiosks.

This way, If users want to have their OneDrive, let them, but I will sleep easy knowing when they screw up, and they will, I can troubleshoot and fix the problem from my house with my family in 5 minutes on a Saturday night, making management love me and all my IT team forever,  while the poor SOB we assign to the OneDrive tech support will be slaving away at the office until 4am trying to figure out why nothing is working and get yelled at on Monday after 2 days of not sleeping on how everything is wrong and the documents are not the ones that were there. 

This is Just a recommendation, We've all done the OneDrive 4am thing, were not to keen on going back to that, ever, and since its our signatures that select and ensure Dropbox is kept as a provider, and paid on time, you should probably take our voice a little more into consideration than our "users", sure they use the thing, and are super vocal about it, but if the thing does not work, its our heads that roll not theirs, so until that changes, we will still pick what ever we think does the job best, and at the moment, that is Dropbox.