Moving Dropbox into iCloud Drive

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Level 1

30 points

Moving Dropbox into iCloud Drive

Hi everyone,

Did some preliminary research into this already. Don't see any reasons why it shouldn't work. But it doesn't.

TL;DR

I moved my dropbox location into my iCloud Drive folder so that I can access all my files in one service but on my Mac, I'm seeing the little "ineligible" symbol next to my dropbox folder. Any idea why and what I can do about it?

Full Story:

I miss the ability to markup and follow an article with my pen while reading. Something that's obviously lost when reading something on a screen. To get around that, I save to PDF and open it up in Notability (http://gingerlabs.com/) and markup/follow along with my finger as I like. Currently Notability doesn't have the "Backup to iCloud" option. But it does have Dropbox which is where all my marksups are stored. I'd like to store them all in one location (iCloud) instead of jumping between dropbox and iCloud Drive. So I moved my dropbox location to my documents folder of iCloud Drive thinking it would be a short and simple process. Unfortunately all my dropbox folders and files have the "ineligible" symbol next to them. Any idea why and what I can do about it?

Or if you can think of a better way of backing up my marked up PDFs to iCloud until Notability includes support for iCloud?

MacBook Air (13-inch, Early 2014)

Posted on Mar 18, 2017 3:02 PM

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Answer 1

Oct 15, 2017 9:59 PM in response to Brainjax44

Possibly in order to prevent incompatibility or other issues, Apple is preventing the user from syncing folders with certain names like "Dropbox" or "Onedrive." If you want to sync those folders that you've copied/moved directly from the original, you simply need to rename those folders to a different name. Of course, you are doing this at your own risk, but I have done this and so far haven't encountered any problems.

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Answer 2

LACAllen

Level 8

43,590 points

Mar 19, 2017 12:51 AM in response to Brainjax44

I can't find the article(s) now, but I have read several that advise against storing cloud provider A's content on cloud provider B and vice versa.

Each has their own way of determining what is local and what is not and data corruption/loss is possible.

You could be seeing that. iCloud's way of handling files may mean Dropbox never considers them actually "uploadable" at any time.

The iCloud Drive folder shown to you in Finder is a link to an actual physical local (but hidden) location...

If you point Dropbox to that location, you may see the syncing you want.

I *HIGHLY* recommend you back up and test this carefully before implementing.

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