Download [HOT] Shared Dropbox Folder Without Adding
Ji Kartchner
Your administrator defines the maximum actions that shared link recipients can take separately for files, folders, and Box Notes and also defines the default choice for each when more than one choice is made available.
Cons A Microsoft account is not required to be invited to view a shared folder. But an account is required to allow editing permissions and, therefore, the ability for an individual in a group to add photos. If someone is granted editing permissions on a shared folder, they can then also copy that shared album to their own OneDrive, which is a security concern. OneDrive is also not optimized to collect video, with a ten-second limit for videos uploaded. There is no built-in messaging for OneDrive either, though it can integrate with third-party messaging platforms like Facebook Messenger. Ultimately, Microsoft products are optimized for Windows and PC products. If the group has users without Microsoft accounts, this should eliminate OneDrive as the solution for gathering photos from groups.
Trello Power-Ups are powerful integrations you can turn on and off from your Trello boards whenever you want to give more depth or complexity to a workflow. This means you can enable them only when and where it's meaningful for your work, a great way to create custom processes without adding clutter.
Shared folder members require a Sync account and a verified email address to accept a shared folder invite, because shared folders synchronize with all team members. Alternately, the person sharing can use shared links in which case a Sync account is not required.
Additionally, if you install the Sync desktop app, you can access the shared folder directly from your computer, just like you would access any other folder on your computer. To improve syncing performance on large shared folders with many files, installing the Sync desktop app is recommended.
The shared folder will be added to your Sync account, and synchronized to your computer if you have the Sync desktop app installed. To improve syncing performance on large shared folders with many files, installing the Sync desktop app is recommended.
Yes, shared folders will use your storage space. Sync Pro and Business customers can invite free Sync users to shared folders, regardless of folder size (free users will always be able to access the folder).
If you joined a shared folder, but no longer need access, you can leave anytime. When you leave the folder is not automatically deleted. You can optionally delete the folder after you have left, if you no longer need access to the files.
In some cases a shared folder may become detached. This will happen if you leave the shared folder. When a shared folder becomes detached, the folder is not deleted from your Sync account, however changes made to the files in the shared folder will no longer be reflected in your folder.
Important: before proceeding with the steps below you should move the detached shared folder outside of your Sync folder (if you have recently made changes to the files) or delete it. When you rejoin a share, the folder will be re-created, which will ensure you are up-to-date with the most current version.
I tried the "restore" trick mentioned by another poster, above. iCloud Drive said it was trying to restore 1,000 files (a small fraction of what I had had), but reported problems doing so. None the less, many of those files were restored, without the directory structure; that is, they were simply dumped into one folder.
Several weeks ago, Google rolled out a change to Drive that lets you create shortcuts to files and folders. The feature had been in testing since August 2019, and its goal is to help you better organize shared files and folders without duplicating them, thus saving you storage and reducing the redundancy and confusion when you move things around. However, this seemingly benign improvement has completely ruined shared folders for anyone who syncs Drive locally to their PC or Mac.
This article and the change it describes applies to people using Google Drive and shared folders, be it on personal Google accounts or G Suite ones. However, if you're a G Suite user, Google recommends something completely different from basic shared files and folders, and which should be unaffected by this change: Shared Drives and Drive File Stream. File Stream may be more tedious to deploy, but it has advantages over Backup & Sync and is better suited for a professional environment. You can get a short explanation of the benefits in this discussion I had with realtestman in our comment section below.
The benefit here is that you can create as many shortcuts as you want, so you could quickly access a shared file or folder from multiple places inside your Drive without duplicating them. Anyone who enjoys hierarchy and organization will love this. File ownership is also clearer on Google's end: One file, one owner, one place. Fewer sync issues, fewer bugs when people make modifications on their end. Based on the company's documentation, this aspect seems to be the biggest motivator behind the change.
The last point needs to be further clarified because it surprised me. Say someone shared with me a "Shared Excel.xlsx" file. From Google Drive web, I created a shortcut for that file in my Drive. I then opened the Drive folder on my PC and saw that the file was fully synced, not as a shortcut, but in its entirety. This was unexpectedly nice. Just to be sure, I turned off internet access, and opened the file. Everything worked. Any changes I made were synced once I came back online.
If I go offline and try to open it, I get hit by the Chrome dino. I have zero access to anything in it. The fact that it shows up as a shared shortcut in my file browser is all I get from it. It's barely a reminder that there's a folder, somewhere, that someone shared with me.
Note that this happens even though Backup and Sync is set up to sync everything on my PC. There's no setting to sync shared folders, and even if I switch to "Sync only these folders," the shortcut folder doesn't show up in the list. It's just not recognized as a folder. The whole problem would go away if it were.
The only way I found to circumvent this shared folder limitation on my PC was to open the folder in Google Drive web and create individual shortcuts for every file inside my Drive. That way I'm dealing with shortcuts to files and not folders, which are more lenient as I explained earlier with the "Shared Excel.xlsx" story. Edit: Google even recommends this as an "alternative" in its documentation.
The issue with this workaround, beside how tedious it is to basically recreate the initial shared folder structure on your end with individual file shortcuts, is that any files that get added later by anyone (owner, me, or other people) won't sync, and any folder structure change won't sync. I'd have to go and double check things every now and then to make sure I'm not missing anything.
I tested the same shared files and folders on my Pixelbook and noticed that things remain largely the same. I can still open shortcuts of shared folders and see their content without being redirected to Drive on the web.
I can also make everything available offline, except Google-type files (Docs, Sheets, Slides). That includes folders too. However, there's one restriction: I can't move a file from my Drive or my computer into the shared folder shortcut. This used to be possible before with regular shared folders. I need to go to Drive on the web to upload any file to this shared folder.
Finally, if I try to move a file from inside a shared folder to my Drive, it creates a copy and keeps the original. You may recall that on the web, it lets me move it but warns me that I'm about to take access away from other people.
It's not a secret anymore, but if you want to avoid this silliness for the next few months until September 2020, then I have a small tip for you. Moving shared folders properly to your Google Drive is still possible in the Android app. I'm using Drive v2.20.121.04 and it's there, but it could be removed in a later version, so here's the APK file if you want to install it manually. It should still work until Google ruins things by changing all folders to shortcuts on the server's end in September. Edit: See update note at the end of the post for a similar solution from the web.
This lets you replicate the old behavior of shared files and folders. In the screenshots below, you can see the new shortcuts as well as duplicates without the shortcut icon. On mobile, there's no difference really, but these shared folders will behave like real folders on your computer, with full local access, and this is how you circumvent the issue... temporarily.
You can move or upload files to a shared folder shortcut, which doesn't matter on mobile but will affect your access if you sync to your computer. You can also move files outside of a shared folder, but like on the web, this removes access from everyone else.
1800 words and dozens of inconsistencies and surprises later, it's abundantly clear that this shortcut change isn't benign. Essentially, we went from "this is a folder, I shared it, done," to a confusing mess and shortcut system that took me hours to untangle... and I think I didn't uncover all the issues yet. It's so confusing that at first we thought this whole situation was a bug, but we reached out to Google which confirmed to us that this is expected behavior.
Even though I understand how things are easier on Google's end with this new approach, the ramifications (though mostly logical) are simply too confusing. Layer after layer, I laughingly wondered if an engineer designed this system and thought it made perfect sense, but forgot that regular users would have to adopt it. Or maybe the Drive devs forgot that PCs and Macs exist, and thought everyone has access to a Chromebook with a fast internet connection all the time. It could also be a conspiracy theory to discourage the usage of non-Google Docs/Sheets/Slides files in Drive, because those files are the most affected when they're inside shared folders.
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