How to Merge or Avoid Dropbox Conflicted Copy Files


Important Announcement for Dropbox Users

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Found yourself staring at conflicting copies in your Dropbox account? Not sure what to do about it? Don’t worry, it’s not going to be too painful to deal with, although it might require a bit of elbow grease to fully resolve. Either way, it’s most important to understand what caused the problem so this issue doesn’t rear its head again in the future to trouble you again.

 

Understanding the problem

Conflicted copies arise most commonly because two people have attempted to edit a file at the same time from different locations. Each person has a copy open on their end, they’re constantly making changes, and then all of them try to save those changes, resulting in a complete mess like situation. This is one situation which Dropbox simply isn’t equipped to resolve. Instead of making an assumption and deleting one version, or attempting to merge multiple versions on its own, Dropbox creates conflicting copies to preserve the work done across different locations.

 

Solutions

Solution 1: Removing the conflicted files

If you simply wish to cleanly delete the conflicted variants of your document and continue with the existing primary document, that is as easy as it can be! All you’ve got to do is make sure you don’t have any conflicting versions still networked in from any other location(s) and then go ahead and delete the conflicting versions from Dropbox. The problem stands resolved in an instance.

How to identify conflicted copies

Edit the files as usual, and then check for any conflicted files in the Dropbox folder. If there are any conflicting files indeed, they will appear as the following screenshot. Remove one of them to solve the conflicted file problem.

Conflicted copies detected

Solution 2: Use Read-only lock for Windows users

Windows users can use the Read-only attribute from the properties area of the files that are more likely to be conflicted. But this may be not an ideal solution when the user is dealing across multiple kinds of platforms.

  1. Right-click on the appropriate file, and select Properties.
  2. Select Read-only from the attribute list.

    Making use of the Read-only feature

Solution 3: Use a folder named “Your Name –in USE”

Files are more likely to be conflicted when all the parties working on them, aren’t aware of changes being continuously made to them. For this reason, use a separate folder and name it as In USE to signal to all the parties that files in this folder are being edited from edited from multiple locations simultaneously.

How to merge Dropbox files that have become conflicted

Now, if you want to preserve both sets of changes, that’s going to be a little more tricky. Dropbox doesn’t have any built-in solutions for such a situation, so you’re going to need to work it out with third party tools or a manual solution. This can be a major pain or very easy, depending on what sort of file you’re looking at, how familiar you are with iteration software for that file type, and how many differences exist between the versions.

In a worst-case scenario, you’ll need to manually adjust one version to contain all of the appropriate content from the variants, then follow the previous set of instructions to delete the redundant versions. This can be very time consuming, but it well might be your only option if you want to preserve everything from two or more conflicted files.

Avoiding future conflicted copies

Once you’ve resolved the issue one way or the other, you can take further steps to avoid this in the future. Whether the issue arose because two or more people worked on the document at the same time or because you had it open on multiple systems, there are three ways to prevent it from arising in the future.

  • Improve communication between collaborators
  • Move documents that are being modified to a different subfolder, so only the most relevant people can access and edit them
  • Move documents from Dropbox to a local folder while they’re being worked on, so nothing can possibly interfere

And there you have it—simple solutions to a common difficulty with Dropbox (and many similar backup and file sharing solutions). If mistakes are made again, and conflicted copies pop up, you’ll know exactly what to do next time.

I am director and business manager at Sorcim Technologies. The product Clone Files Checker, this blog, and the content written for the blog are the properties of Sorcim. We are responsible for the content and we are always willing to answer your queries about our solutions. We encourage you to contact us should you have any questions!

We are into IT since 2004. We love to make software programs, web-services and mobile applications that solve various computing problems.