You might see that the Dropbox Community team have been busy working on some major updates to the Community itself! So, here is some info on what’s changed, what’s staying the same and what you can expect from the Dropbox Community overall.

Forum Discussion

Grotaz's avatar
Grotaz
Explorer | Level 4
2 years ago

Dropbox refuses to download a file from a 'Phantom' Documents file structure: A hopeless tangle

Hello

Dropbox has pushed many of my files on my MacBook Pro into a location in the Dropbox file structure called 'My Mac (Greg's MacBook Air) / Documents'. This is even though the MacBook Air is a computer I do not use any more. So I have a hopeless tangle, whereby modifying a file which looks like it resides on the MacBook Air can cause problems with the MacBook Pro operation. In addition, since these files although they are seemingly on 'MacBook Pro / Documents' are really in the stratosphere of Dropbox and refuse to download. When I have tried downloading a large Final Cut project file using the Web version of Dropbox, the download takes many hours and has twice aborted already. I have had to start from scratch with the project.

 

I am currently in the process of untangling this mess, but it may all happen again, I don't know.

 

Any ideas on this?

 

Thanks

Greg

Desktop
Download
Dropbox Backup
File access
Mac
  • Hannah's avatar
    Hannah
    Icon for Dropbox Staff rankDropbox Staff
    2 years ago

    Hey Grotaz, thanks for bringing this to our attention.

     

    It sounds like you have enabled our backup feature on your MacBook Air computer previously, but did you also enable it for your MacBook Pro?

     

    Would you mind sending us some screenshots explaining the situation and the setup, so we can have a visual as well?

     

    If you go to your Dropbox folder, do you see a "Mac" folder that has your MacBook Pro desktop files in it?

     

    Thanks in advance.

    • Grotaz's avatar
      Grotaz
      Explorer | Level 4
      2 years ago

      Hello Hannah

      Here is a screenshot from the Macbook Pro.

       

       

       

       

       

      Here are two from the Macbook Air. They show that the drop-down path window says:

      My Mac (Greg's Macbook Air)

      while the Finder view says:

      Mac (2).

      This is inconsistent and confusing.

       

       

       

       

       

       

        

      • Hannah's avatar
        Hannah
        Icon for Dropbox Staff rankDropbox Staff
        2 years ago

        Thanks for the screenshots, Grotaz.

         

        Hmm, if you check your backups page online, do you see both computers backed up there?

About View, download, and export

Need support with viewing, downloading, and exporting files and folders from your Dropbox account? Find help from the Dropbox Community.

Need more support

If you need more help you can view your support options (expected response time for an email or ticket is 24 hours), or contact us on X or Facebook.

For more info on available support options for your Dropbox plan, see this article.

If you found the answer to your question in this Community thread, please 'like' the post to say thanks and to let us know it was useful!