psconfig

After a reboot, Dropbox on one of my Macs wasn’t playing very nice. From time to time, permission issues do crop up, but they’re usually due to storing your Dropbox on a file share or a non-native file system (e.g. FAT32) and my home directory is neither of those. This used to be a convoluted process that involved a trip to the command line, but it looks like the Dropbox team has added some hidden functionality to make this a breeze.

The Old Way

Run the following commands from a terminal window:

1. sudo chown -R $USER ~/Dropbox
2. sudo chmod -R u+rw ~/Dropbox
3. sudo chown -R $USER ~/.dropbox
4. sudo chmod -R u+rw ~/.dropbox

The New Way

Open the Preferences pane for Dropbox and:

1. Click the Account tab.
2. Hold down the Option key and the Unlink This Computer… button will become a Fix Permissions button.
3. Click the Fix Permissions button and quit Dropbox.
4. Restart Dropbox.