How to rename the ‘My Dropbox’ folder on Windows
I use dropbox to synchronize key files (like my KeePass databases) between home and work machines. It works great, except for one thing that I really hate: the Dropbox developers have decided that I cannot be trusted to decide what to call my dropbox folder; only to choose where it goes. Wherever I pick, the client creates a folder called ‘My Dropbox’ and puts my files there. But I don’t want that.
In old builds of the client you could choose the name, but despite a number of complaints on the support forums, Dropbox developers have not seen fit to correct this oversight.
I set about to determine where this is stored and how to change it. I found out the dropbox.db file in my <user>\AppData\Roaming\Dropbox folder on Windows 7 is a SQLite 3 database. Using a SQLite database GUI I opened it up and found a table called ‘config’, with a value called ‘dropbox_path’. The value appeared to base base64 encoded.
I exported the column to a file and opened that file in WinHex. I had to drop an extra carriage-return from the file, then WinHex was able to do the base64-binary conversion. The path was a little weird looking, with the backslashes escaped as Unicode character codes, but it wasn’t hard to change. I then re-encoded the file to base64, imported the base64 encoded version back into the column in the SQL database, and voila!
I did have to manually copy over my dropbox files from the previous folder location, but otherwise it seems to work fine.
After I did all that, I noticed in the forums that someone already has a python script to do just that. Oh well. I still got the satisfaction of reverse engineering around a stupid limitation in the tool.
What blows my mind is that even after multiple users have written little tools to solve this problem, the Dropbox team still haven’t taken a fucking hint and incorporated back into the client. If it wasn’t such a cool service I’d quit using it on the basis of that bullshit alone.