Preventing folders from being moved

[David G.14]

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.

[Walter]

This idea has been closed as it has reached the end of the Share an Idea process.

Thank you for your suggestion, and if you have another idea to share, please do! 

[Kevin C.20]

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. 

[Susan S.26]

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.

[Kevin C.20]

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.

[Jerry R.8]

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!

[Stephanie V.3]

This is a big problem for my team, as well.  Any help in locking folder locations would be great!

[Emily K.8]

Any more information on this? This is a real flaw in the system.

[Cory d.3]

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.

[Frank P.14]

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.

[MariH]

Big issue here too. Hoping for news on this one!

[sh9]

Agreed! This would be SOOOOO helpful. It's way to easy for entire folders to disappear in the manner you describe 😞