I have a Mac Pro, it has an SSD. A small one, only 256GB. To combat this I have like everyone else, an external USB (3.0) hard drive. Well I didn’t put much though into Dropbox when I installed it like how much I would use it, and how big the folder is going to get. With all my recent hard drive failure and data loos I am scrambling to do what I can to protect my data now. Better late than never.

The default location for the Dropbox folder is your home directory. If you have a big enough hard drive this will work out just fine. But as I don’t, it did not. I realized I was going to need more Dropbox space, no biggie, they have an upgrade option. OK cool. Ah but hard drive space… that’s an issue. I do have 3TB of external space, so I am not running out of space, just was going to eventually run out of space on the small main drive. The Dropbox upgrade gives you 1TB of backup. I would like to utilize this space as much as possible. It just happens to be that I have an empty 1TB partition on the external drive. Perfect.

Now I need to relocate the folder. Well, the Dropbox app on macOS has a built-in feature to do this. Naturally it didn’t work. It copied the files and folders 100% but then it said I had errors, but wouldn’t tell me what – typical Apple. I tried a few more times. I tried pausing sync first. I tried uninstalling the app. Nothing I tried seemed to work. Then I found the fix for my issue. I unlinked the account. That seemed to delete all the preferences associated with the folder location. I was then able to relink the account and choose the starting location. It worked. Then I paused sync, closed the app and copied the files over manually to the new location real quick so I didn’t have to re-download them all. Restart Dropbox and a few minutes later it was all happy.

I hope you see this BEFORE you install and use Dropbox, but probably not. So hopefully this helps you after the fact.