dropbox partition
Last week I was discussing a frustration of mine about Dropbox. Frequently, I will drag a file out of a shared folder on Dropbox intending to copy it to a more suitable location for editing, storage, etc., but it instead moves the file to the new location. In the process, it’s removed from the Dropbox folder, and subsequently from the folder on all shared computers.
What I really wanted to happen is what happens when you drag a file out of a different drive. The file is copied, and unchanged in its original location. My friend Sean’s suggestion was (in hindsight an obvious one) make a separate partition for Dropbox.
So I did. I haven’t witnessed a huge number of advantages to this, but it does fix my copy/move problem. It also appeases my own mental delineation between Dropbox and regular files on my hard drive. Conceptually, Dropbox is a separately maintained file structure, mainly for small files and quick automated backup.
If you would like to do this, here are some simple instructions. First you need to create new partition using Disk Utility. I created a seperate partition roughly the size of my available online storage. Then you need to move the Dropbox folder location. The Dropbox option for changing the location of the “Dropbox” folder did not work for me. It failed repeatedly with an error about not being able to copy some files. Instead, I copied the folder manually to the new location. Unlinked my computer from Dropbox, and re-linked it to the new location. You will need to select the option to merge with the existing “Dropbox” folder, which will recognize the files are already there and be syncronized almost immediately.
At first I named the drive Dropbox, and had it sync directly as the Dropbox folder. The problem with this was that the root of a partition has many hidden files such as the trashes folder. This syncs a lot of unneccessary junk to Dropbox, and wastes too much space. So instead I named my drive “Cloud,” and kept “Dropbox” as a sub-directory.
Anyways, it was a good solution for me. If anybody else tries it, feel free to leave your findings in the comments.