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Forum Discussion
Dropbox syncing issues between Windows and Mac due to incompatible characters
We have shared document libraries with multiple users with both Windows and Mac and recently we have encountered an issue where some data is not syncing to devices. It appears Dropbox allows the addition of special / reserved characters in file and folder names and these files and folders are therefore simply ignored and not synced to devices.
What is the best way to approach this issue and is there an easy way to rename all files, folders with special reserved characters in the file / folder names online and therefore they are able to sync?
How can we search for these specific instances and ideally rename them all to avoid issues?
Notably reserved characters include the following and potentially others? " * : < > ? / \ |
Thank you for any assistance any one can offer, it is much appreciated.
Cheers
- Hannah
Dropbox Staff
Hey J10000, welcome to the Dropbox Community.
This is indeed a situation that happens very often between Windows and Mac computers.
I'm afraid there's no specific or automatic way to search for or rename those files; it has to be done manually.
Once the files are renamed, though, they should automatically sync across all connected devices.
Let me know if you have any questions.
Thank you for the reply Hannah.
The total DropBox data for this user is approximately 1.6TB with hundreds of thousands of files in multiple libraries i.e. 1 x library is hypothetically 150GB and 200,000+ files.
How do we search and locate all of these files to even begin to manually rename the problematic data?
Shouldn't this be blocked by DropBox to ensure data is available across multi OS environments?
Thank you again for your response, advise.
Cheers
- Hannah
Thanks for your reply, J10000.
I completely understand where you're coming from, however, this isn't really controlled by Dropbox, but by the OS.
You can search for files as you normally would through the search bar on dropbox.com, but there's no special way to search for these files, I'm afraid.
I'll definitely pass your feedback along to our team about this, though, so thanks for taking the time to let us know about your experience.
