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
New named Dropbox structure
I am a user of DropBox Business, on Windows 10.
Last week, I suddenly realized that the shortcuts to some of my Dropbox folders were broken.
A quick look learned me that the structure had changed...
This morning Dropbox did a database update and all the folders in our work Dropbox are now under main folders with each users name. What has happened? Is this a new folder structure that Dropbox implemented? I cannot find anything about such a change.
Same thing happened to us. Whole path structure is broken, software we are using non of them work properly as they cannot access files with correct paths. Whos great idea on Dropbox side was this? Especially in Business sector when companies relies on precise file structures?
This is not an acceptable change that you are pushing as an "upgrade". You are going to break systems for my team and I'm going to have to try to fix what you've "improved" over the weekend. You should not modify any file system paths. We rely on them being static. Your postponement window is also too narrow and does not allow for long-term planning of this project - and it is a project to adjust to this on our side.
It appears to me the business account is updated and personal named folder is added to the root folder.
This creates the below problems :
1) Our office team used to send across folder path in whatsapp for quick file sharing, with the added peronal named folder, all files has unique path and cannot be shared efficiently.
2) Our team uses programme like Rhino / Indesign, which one file will link to another file, like the material mapping, or link to a illustration etc. With the added personal named folder, my colleauge now have trouble to open another rhino / indesign file, as all the links are wrong. It limits our team ability of sharing working file across.
I don't see there is any benefit of adding a personal name folder as the root folder for the dropbox, and it creates a lot of problem for office using dropbox as their server and sharing work file. If someone needs a personal named folder, they can simply open a folder as they want at anywhere, which is under the team's control, rather than a compulsory change. I strongly recommend to revert back the version WITHOUT the personal named root folder. I believe this issue also happened for many other offices, and as a user we are looking for alternative platform to solve this problem. I hope Dropbox can review this asap.This is exactly our setup. In a customer perspective, a totally unneeded change.
Thank you!
I came into the office today with some people saying they couldn't get on, others saying all their files were showing 0kb size. Troubleshooting, I noticed all of my files have been moved from /dropbox/client/file.pdf to /dropbox/username/client/file.pdf. So millions of files are not in their expected location.
I haven't personally had it get in my way yet, but I'm confused as to where the world was told this was going to happen, and I'm scared to death with long file names. Filename maximum is set to 256 characters on both operating systems, and that includes the folder structure. So, for example, c://user/colin/dropbox (company name)/First Last/client/filings/initial/2022/June/2022_06_30 Spreadsheet of Outstanding Invoices.xlsx is 130 characters. In a business, it doesn't take much for at least one file to magically hit 256 and not sync; we face it all the time. And now that's effectively a different number for each person—since my name is 11 characters, a space and a slash, my max is now 243.
Our office is mostly Macs, and so far everyone affected has been on a Mac. But the new root feature/bug is on the browser also, so I'm not sure that being on a Mac is related.
Yeah, not a "feature" I had been looking for either.
Something went wrong during my "upgrade" so I now have two dropbox folders. The one has (old) added to its name and contains all my files.
The other only has an empty Pictures folder.
Dropbox says it's downloading 125,866 files which will take around 2 days to finish.
Not really the way I wanted to start my Monday.
I'm the admin for this account but I do not recall having seen any important updates coming to your dropbox message. At least no email that stood out and made me think I needed to take any action.
So what do I do? Wait two days for dropbox to sync the new folder and fill up my disk with a second copy of all my files?
Any suggestions would be very welcome
Thanks
- Jay
Dropbox Staff
Hi LZiegler1, MrColJ, thanks for bringing this to our attention.
It sounds like your Dropbox Business team has recently upgraded to the new team space.
Your team admin would've received an email about this change and how to prepare the team for the upgrade.
You can read more about the team space in this article on the new structure for the team.
If you need any further assistance, please let me know!
another update:
after automatic update, dropbox changed settings by it owns from local to online only. So basically without our permission it deleted all our company files we had locally! now for several days we are unable to access files properly as sync is so slow as most likely most of companies have similar problems.
For "file hosting service" company, changing file structures, deleting client files stored locally, and forcing other nonsense is absolutely insane!
I just spent time with Customer Service chat. It's a feature, not a bug! It only applies to Dropbox for Business customers, and yes, will mean your computer will re-download everything.
Upcoming Business Team Changes
As you can see from the link above, we are told to be excited about it (but without any actual reasons.)
This folder structure has crippled my company this week and has create chaos and confusion. Your rollout of this new 'feature' has been a disaster.
Same. Completely blew up the entire week. Instead of finishing projects, we're realizing we need to reinstall dropbox and re-sync Terabytes of project files and media because the folder structure update broke our Dropbox volumes. Insanity.
Hello Dropbox for Business users,
Did the August 5th automated system update move or change the organization of your file folders? I'm now seeing folders in the main company folder that were previously subfolders, and some main folders which have become subfolders under my user folder. Trying to figure out if this is a permanent change, or just temporary while files are being updated/synced. We are an A/E firm using AutoCAD extensively, and I'm concerned the update may have change file paths/locations, which in turn will mess up the file paths for our AutoCAD files.
It seems this update was more extensive than I originally anticipated, so I'm trying to find out more information regarding changes to file organization.
Thanks!The whole reason we use Dropbox for Business is to share files within the organization. With the new, unwanted rearchitecture, all the folders got put inside a User Name folder, and I can't drag/move them back to the top level where I want them. It prevents me from moving them in the Finder plugin (MacOS) and it is also grayed out / not possible in the web app.
Any thoughts on how to restore previous organization to shared files? We DO NOT want user-named folders, just the top level DropBox <businessname> as it was before.
Our entire Team Folder structure has been destroyed by upgrading from Business Standard to Business Advanced.
All Team folders were converted to Shared Folders and one admin account is now the owner of them all, however they have no access to move them to the Teams Space.
This was not communicated by Dropbox as a possibility with the upgrade and has resulted in hundreds of hours of work to recreate everything including re-sharing hundreds individual files with external stakeholders and removed every link we have shared.
Dropbox Supports only advice is to copy the contents to new team folders but as I've mentioned to them it break all sharing. They haven't provided any adequate solutions and refuse to escalate this issue.We are extremely unhappy as an organisation.
Hello
I am having a same problem, and I am about to leave dropbox for that reason. I have been paying business account for my entire architect's office over 5 years now. Because of name change, all my reference links is gone now. I spoke to Help, but they can't do anything. The only reason I've paid to dropbox is not to lose reference connection. Now, my office is stopped. Do you have any solution for loosing references?
- Jay
Hi HSMA, it sounds like you recently migrated to the new team space. as noted by Rich.
This means that any existing links and files would be in different locations, so they might need to be updated in order for certain file types to work.
Some files use relative links (as in ../John/file.xlsx) or absolute links (C:\Dropbox\John\file.xlsx), so some files might not need major changes to links.
- Mark
Super User II
Dropbox updates only literally update the software they dont move things around in your account.
Have a look at www.dropbox.com/events to see who/what moved them. If you click on one of the files and 'Restore Previous Versions' it will show you more info about who/what did it.
Thanks for the link, but it doesn't appear anyone in the organization has made changes in the last 24 hours that would result in file reorganization.
I just noticed I'm seeing a difference in some of the folders - rather than having the two building icon on team folders, they have a clock and appear to be empty. I'm not sure what the clock represents, as I've never seen it before and it isn't listed here; https://help.dropbox.com/files-folders/sort-preview/file-folder-symbol-icon
Thanks again for the quick response.
Recently the business portion of Dropbox now has my folders under a new directory as my user name and I need to open / uncollapse that in file explorer every time I want to view my files and folders. This added step every time is annoying. Any idea why this happened and if there is away to revert? I did some searching and may be related to teams. I am the Admin / Owner and my user type is Team Admin (no idea if the team part is the issue or how to correct).
- Megan
Hi Leatherfoot, happy Thursday!
At the moment, it's not possible to change the structure of how your Dropbox account looks in your File Explorer, since it mimics and syncs the account the same way you see it on the web.
What you describe is indeed related to how a Business team behaves. Your comments on this have been quite helpful, and I will do everything I can to ensure that your voice is heard.
I hope this clarifies!
As a semi-workaround if you have a few key folders you use all the time, you can right click and add them to 'Quick Access' so they show in that section at the top of your windows explorer side bar.
