Unsharing many folders at once in Dropbox
I'm aware that the party line is that unsharing must be done one folder at a time, but I have literally hundreds of subfolders (all within one big folder) shared with different people. Some of these subfolders are shared with scores of people.
I need to unshare ALL of them, and I don't want to let any of the other parties keep copies of the files.
Do I really need to go through the menus for each individual subfolder? I'm open to almost any approach. This is making my hands bleed.
43 Answers
Pardon my javascript, but automated this for 2019 Dropbox:
function pause() { return new Promise(resolve => { setTimeout(() => { resolve(); }, 1000); });
}
async function job() { do { var items = document.getElementsByClassName("browse-overflow-menu-trigger"); items.item(0).click(); await pause(); document.getElementsByClassName("delete-link").item(0).click(); await pause(); document.getElementsByClassName("button-primary dbmodal-button").item(0).click(); await pause(); } while (items.length > 0);
}
job();Go onto Sharing -> Links tab and paste the code into the console. Enjoy.
2As a test, I created a folder within my Dropbox account and deposited a few files. I created a share using the utility feature of the web interface.
After receiving confirmation of the share, I used Windows File Explorer and created a second folder, then moved all the files in the test folder to the second folder.
Dropbox then generated a dialog box indicating that all the previously shared files would lose sharing as a result of this transfer.
I suspected this would happen, as it is typical behavior for ordinary shared folders in Windows.
You may find it convenient to create a temporary or permanent folder location and move the hundreds of files and folders into that new location. This will disengage the features provided by Dropbox sharing, but at the speed of Windows file transfer action.
If you are not using Windows, substitute your preferred file manager for the operating system in use and I suspect the results will be the same.
1You can try this:
Copy your ENTIRE Dropbox folder to a local drive.
Delete the files, but not folders, in the Dropbox synced folder. This will ?probably? delete the files in shared folders on the computers' of users you shared with.
Wait for sync to finish.
Clear out the remainder of the Dropbox folder (i.e., delete the folders). This will keep the shared (though empty) folders on the computers of users you shared with.
Copy the local data (folders+files) back to the Dropbox folder. While it may take a while for it to re-sync, it will just be re-indexing all of your files and won't need to re-upload them so if you have a decent processor but slow internet connection it won't be too much of an inconvenience. I would definitely do a test run on a sample folder first. You will probably lose dropbox metadata such as file-level comments, shared links, etc. Note, you also should make sure you have appropriate backups etc. whenever you clear out your cloud storage.
2
