When the Preferences window opens, select the Sync tab.Click on Dropbox’s menu bar icon as I mentioned above, then pick the small gear you’ll find there and choose Preferences.If you’d like to change the location of your Dropbox folder, though, how do you go about it? Well, you can’t just go around moving the folder all willy-nilly, so these are the steps you’ll follow if you want to change your Dropbox folder location! Change Dropbox Folder Location in macOS
#SPT5JC ERROR DROPBOX ON MAC MAC#
If you use the Dropbox app, you probably know that its files are, by default, stored on the Mac in what’s called your Home folder, and a shortcut to your Dropbox is usually added to the sidebar of the Finder.Īlternatively, of course, you can access your synced Dropbox files by selecting the program’s menu bar icon at the top of your screen and clicking the folder icon. Which is high praise from me considering how much I have to troubleshoot issues from pretty much every other service and app on the planet. In fact, I can’t recall the last time I had to troubleshoot any big issues with it for either myself or my clients. Years! And I appreciate not just its ease of use but how consistent and stable its app is on the Mac. I’ve been using Dropbox-a file-sharing, storage, and syncing service-for a really long time now. Hopefully you’ll find that Dropbox has to do a little sync to catch up, but afterwards works as expected.How to Change the Dropbox Folder Location on the Mac Otherwise, you’ll have to search around and find filecache.dbx.
If it says that the file exists, type the command below. Caution - if you don’t know what you’re doing, typing the wrong command in Terminal could be a disaster.Ĭopy and paste in this command: & echo "File exists"'!' || echo "Sorry, I don't see the right file." Open up /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app.Repair Dropbox permissions as described above ( Preferences -> Account -> click something, then hit escape, then option to reveal the button).If you haven’t already, you should probable try the “official” fixes first (see above).If you know your Dropbox installation is not immediately under your home folder, you’ll need to change the commands slightly, but this should work for a default installation. Because I have a suspicion this is related to git / virtualenv and Dropbox, I assume there’s some component of permissions problems, so I’ve been repairing permissions as well (but as I said, this alone doesn’t fix the problem).īecause people may have different paths for their Dropbox, I can’t say this will work for everyone, but it might be worth a shot if you’re going nuts over this problem like I was. The solution I’ve finally come up with is that deleting ~/.dropbox/instance1/filecache.dbx seems to be the fix. I did find that deleting the ~/.dropbox folder fixed the issue for a while, but it made me reset selective sync settings and such… and when the problem came back, I didn’t want to go through that again, so I set out to find what it was in that folder that fixed the issue. Neither did numerous restarts, or repairing permissions on my Mac.
button, I can then hit esc to get back out of that screen, and suddenly the Fix Permissions button shows up when I hit option. However, if I click the Selective Sync’s Change Settings. For some strange reason, it doesn’t show up on my Mac unless I first click another button on that tab. It’s hidden behind the Unlink This Dropbox button in the Account tab in Dropbox’s preferences - you have to hold down the option button to reveal it. Next, I found out that Dropbox (v2.10.30) has a hidden “fix permissions” tool.
#SPT5JC ERROR DROPBOX ON MAC INSTALL#
(By the way, I have to mention this great rename utility available in Homebrew, brew install rename). I found a handful of files with invalid file names, which I either renamed or deleted. Next, I tried checking for problematic files using a Dropbox-hosted tool I didn’t even know about. Unfortunately, it required me to re-set all my “Selective Sync” settings. The first few things I tried were following the official Dropbox instructions for this problem. I think it probable has something to do with me keeping a few git repositories and virtualenvs in Dropbox (mostly for the automated backup, which has come in handy). It would show the “syncing” icon in the task bar, and if I clicked to see what was syncing, it would just cycle between tens of thousands of files to sync, then thousands, then hundreds, then just a few… and then jump back up to several thousand. I had a persistent sync issues with Dropbox for several weeks - it was running continuously and revving up the CPU on my Mac (as shown in Activity Monitor). Bottom Line: Try deleting the filecache.dbx file if you have a sync problem that isn’t fixed by following the official Dropbox instructions.