when I remove dropbox and box, how do I avoid having to re-download hundreds of gigabyte again through the internet, i.e. can’t I copy them locally first?
Do you need all those files to live on your computer? If you don’t need them, the default odrive experience is to use placeholder files. By default, odrive will not download any file unless you open them. You can keep the original sync folders for backup or you can remove them (after you remove the dropbox or box sync client).
Hi @moritz,
As @peter stated, odrive will use placeholders by default, so as not to waste bandwidth and local disk space. Unless you need those hundreds of gigabytes cached locally, we recommend utilizing the default placeholder ability of odrive to target only the specific data you need to access at any given time.
If you do require the data to be local and “active” once you move over to odrive, you can take a look at this post for some information on migrating existing local data like this: Any way to map existing laptop folders already synced to my services?
I don’t need them all and will use odrive selective syn. Yet I would need to have instant offline access to quite a few of them that I would like to avoid having to delete and then re-download.
I will try the trick that is described in the post that Tony shared, that looks exactly like what I was looking for 
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