How can I download a big folder to my external HDD on Mac?

[Cloudie]

Peace to all!

I was able to transfer the Dropbox app to my new external hard drive formatted and connected to my Mac, but now I am struggling to download a big folder from my account webpage. I select the folder on my account webpage and hit "Download" and nothing happens. If I try to select all the files and hit download I get an error message saying it can't zip that much. I also can't do it in batches because there are a zillion video clips. And I don't want it to zip because that can cause data loss. Could someone please help me with this?

Thanks!

Cloudie

[Rich · Accepted solution]

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@Cloudie wrote:

... I am struggling to download a big folder from my account webpage.

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If you have the Dropbox application installed on your computer, are you not able to sync the folder normally, instead of downloading it manually?

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If I try to select all the files and hit download I get an error message saying it can't zip that much. I also can't do it in batches because there are a zillion video clips.

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If the folder is too large to Zip, you'll have to download it in batches. There's no other way.

Downloading a folder will always result in a Zip file, but there are limits to how big a folder can be when downloading it as a Zip. Before being compressed the folder must be less than 250GB with fewer than 10,000 files. There's no way to directly download a folder from the Dropbox website without it being Zipped first.

[Cloudie]

Seems to be resolved. I had forgotten to open the app in my Finder.  Thanks.

[Cloudie]

Thanks, Rich! The work sync is confusing to me. But that seems to be the way to go: "Make available offline."

[Cloudie]

Peace to all

I was able to download my folder to the DB app on my external drive, but there's a discrepancy in the number of files

(955 online vs 1, 244 on hdd).

I would like to understand what happened, and if there are doubles, and how I can locate them.

Could anyone please help me with this?

Thanks,

Robert

[Nancy]

@Cloudie, can you send over a couple of screenshots showing what you see online and on the Dropbox app? I’d like to have a visual and go from there.