Apple 🍏 Folder Under Dropbox?

[dave1 (Dave K)]

Has anyone seen this “apple” folder under their Dropbox folder?

Its name starts with the Apple, Inc. apple logo followed by “Mac”, and it sits inside the Dropbox folder of my friend Myrna’s MacBook Pro running Sequoia:

I have never seen this before, and since I’m still nervous about Sequoia, I haven’t upgraded any of my Macs to that, and therefore wondered if it was a new Sequoia invention.

On the other hand, while I do use Dropbox extensively myself and have never seen it before, it could also be something that Dropbox invented as a way to “move” your Desktop, Documents, and Downloads into their cloud.

Regardless, it’s causing my friend lots of confusion, largely because her REAL Desktop, the one that occupies the default playground in the Finder, apparently still sits directly under her home directory, and has a different set of files than the “apple logo” one under Dropbox:

We are speculating that Dropbox TRIED to move her Desktop to their cloud, and either failed to alias her real Desktop so that they’re one and the same, or they didn’t realize how horrible the user experience would be leaving a user with two different desktops: the real one that’s not in the cloud, and the Dropbox copy that the user will likely have trouble finding and has totally different files.

This has added further confusion, because she just got a new MacBook Pro, and needs to migrate everything, but isn’t clear how to do so, and doesn’t want the new laptop to have a broken Dropbox experience the way her old one has. I have thoughts about how to help rescue her, but really need to understand this first.

Does anyone know what’s going on here?

[ddmiller (Doug Miller)]

I don’t use Dropbox anymore, but any chance that your friend turned on Dropbox Backup (see also How to update Dropbox Backup - Dropbox Help),

[dave1 (Dave K)]

@ddmiller

any chance that your friend turned on Dropbox Backup

Interesting theory! That page doesn’t say anything about this apple “Mac” folder. But there’s an interesting note:

With the updated Dropbox Backup, your backed up folders will no longer move from their default location to the Dropbox folder on your computer

This seems to suggest that at some point it may very well have moved those 3 folders (Desktop, Documents, Downloads). Perhaps after they changed the behavior they didn’t put things back properly??

[ace (Adam Engst)]

Does Dropbox have an option that tries to put all your data in Dropbox? If that’s the case, the Mac folder might be its way of creating a top-level hierarchy.

[dave1 (Dave K)]

That’s my guess, Adam. Specifically, it seems most likely that this is Dropbox’s mechanism for implementing “Dropbox Backup”. Google AI says:

Dropbox Backup allows you to back up specific files and folders from your computer to the cloud, including your Desktop, Documents, Downloads, and other selected directories,

though it’s annoying that even following the source links to that comment, I can’t find confirmation of that. But I’m sure Google AI didn’t make that up, and it matches what I saw on Myrna’s machine.

I’m curious how Dropbox implemented it though… did they “alias” her real Desktop folder in such a way that the new Desktop folder buried in Dropbox actually functioned as her desktop? And then something broke that, bifurcating her experience and creating two separate islands called “Desktop”, one reflecting reality and the other buried in her Dropbox folder?

I don’t know. And likely, Dropbox Support, whom she chatted with today, has no solution to it; she’s going to have to sift through thousands of files buried in folders and try to merge the two “desktops”.

I will say that iCloud did something like this to me years back when I tried their Desktop and Documents option, and then disabled it later. I think maybe the cloud providers are happy to duplicate your data, but they’re scared to death to delete anything en masse. Instead, they probably want you do put things back where you want them and sort through duplicates.

Not pleasant. And sometimes outright debilitating.