Migrate data from Dropbox folder to odrive/Dropbox folder

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I am currently using the Dropbox client, so (a portion of) my Dropbox files are stored in my ~/Dropbox folder. I intend to stop using the Dropbox client, and rely exclusively on the odrive client, so my Dropbox files will move to ~/odrive/Dropbox. I would like to avoid re-syncing all this data, and am wondering what is a good way to achieve that.

One possibility is to do the following:

  1. Stop syncing for both the Dropbox and odrive clients.
  2. Move the data from ~/Dropbox to ~/odrive/Dropbox
  3. Setup odrive to sync the Dropbox files to ~/odrive/Dropbox
  4. Re-enable odrive sync
  5. Uninstall the Dropbox client.

Please confirm this would work without requiring re-downloading all the data. If this is not the case, please suggest a better approach.

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Hi @george,
Take a look at this post here, which goes through a method of doing this:

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Hi George,
I’ve already tried this at small scale (not the whole local Dropbox folder) and it seems to work exactly as you outlined. Note just that it’s important to stop both clients before moving and then start Odrive again. Disabling auto sync with running Odrive resulted in some inconsistent state where it didn’t recognize the files. Restarting it helped.

To test that on some small sample you can move just one folder:

  • quit Odrive
  • remove placeholders in ~/odrive/Dropbox/foo
  • copy ~/Dropbox/foo to ~/odrive/Dropbox/foo
  • exclude ~/Dropbox/foo in Dropbox selective sync (it will remove the files locally)
  • start Odrive again
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