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I'm wanting to update my laptop from Linux Mint 15 to 16 as support is being dropped as of January.

One of the main things holding me back is how long it takes for me to resync my Dropbox after a new installation. I have about 40GB of content uploaded and not surprisingly it takes quite a while to redownload it all to my fresh OS. I know there's LAN sync but that can take awhile too sometimes on my router.

Is there a way of restoring my Dropbox using physical media without it trying to reupload everything?

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Basically, all you need to do is copy the contents of your Dropbox folder to wherever you place your new Dropbox folder.

If you do this before selecting the folder you're going to use, Dropbox will still spend some time, but it'll only be on the verification of the files that are already in the folder.

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  • So it doesn't get all befuddled and attempt to resync all the files?
    – Ben
    Jan 13, 2014 at 20:54
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    @Ben No, it downloads a list of the files that are meant to be in your account, and verifies all of them. The process will still take some time, but Dropbox and its sync mechanism is smart: only changed data will sync. Provided you set the correct folders, very little but file lists with hashes of some sort will download.
    – Thor
    Jan 13, 2014 at 20:57
  • Dropbox has to completely scan all 40GB to see if the 4MB file hashes match what is on the server. Like Thor says, that will take some time.
    – Sun
    Mar 9, 2015 at 19:28

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