IAMTech

How to run two dropboxes on your computer at the same time

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Why would you want to have two dropboxes at the same time?  One illegitimate reason would be to get more dropbox quota.  We do not recommend you do this as this is dishonest – if you need more space please pay for it (or earn it in one of the many legitimate ways Dropbox gives you to earn more space)!

A legitimate reason would be that you personally use dropbox for sharing files with people, and your organisation also uses dropbox and you want to keep the two dropboxes completely independent (sometimes it is an organisation requirement for them to be kept independent – as is the case in IAM).

How do we do it?

If you are using a Mac, scroll down for instructions, they are below the Windows instructions.  As Windows is the most common operating system used in Afghanistan we’ll cover it first.

Windows instructions

Googling this problem will come give you an assortment of methods, including some using a portable version of dropbox or a tool called dropboxen.  Both of these methods have problems that mean that they now either don’t work or have a high risk of dropbox failing.

We’ve combined parts of a number of different guides to come up with the best combination and added our own simple script to ensure that your second dropbox application is always able to run the current version of the dropbox software (a common failing of the solutions on the internet is that the second dropbox application doesn’t ever upgrade when new versions are released).

Before we start, we assume that you have already installed dropbox on your computer and set it up with your work dropbox account and that you are reading these instructions because you want to know how to have your personal dropbox account on the same computer.  We also assume that you are using Windows 10 because it is free to upgrade from Windows 7/8/8.1 to Windows 10 and you wouldn’t be using anything earlier than Windows 7.  You will need a copy of the dropbox installation software.  If you only just installed dropbox then you should have the installation file handy – save it to a USB stick.  If you installed it a long time ago you could download it again, but dropbox often keeps a download that you could just copy.  Take a look in c:\program files (x86)\dropbox\update\download\a_long_set_of_numbers_and_letters\version_number\ and you will hopefully find a file called dropboxclient_version.exe.  If it is here you don’t need to copy it to a memory stick, but if not you’ll need to download it from www.dropbox.com and copy it to your memory stick.

Step 1: Create a personaldropbox user account on your computer

  1. Press WINDOWS-X on your keyboard (WINDOWS is the special windows key between CTRL and ALT on the left side of your keyboard) and choose Control Panel from the menu that pops up.
  2. In the top right corner of Control Panel type “create an account” in the search box and press enter.  It will then show you a “Create an account” link.  Click on it.  At the bottom of the list of accounts that will be displayed there will be “Add a new user in PC settings”.  Click on this.
  3. Click “Add someone else to this PC”.  You may have to wait a moment at this point while Windows does something mysterious.  After a while you will be asked “how will this person sign in”.  Choose”I don’t have this person’s sign in information”.  Then you will be asked to create an account for them. Don’t.  Choose “Add a user without a Microsoft account” from the bottom of the window.  Who’s going to use this PC should be “personaldropbox”.  The simplest thing is to use the same password as for your own account – since both accounts are owned by you.  Enter it twice and set the hint to anything you want.  Press Next.
  4. Your account has now been created.

Step 2: Log on as the new user account and setup dropbox

  1. Press Windows-L to lock the computer.
  2. You will now see two user accounts in the bottom left corner of the screen when you need to sign in, select “personaldropbox” and enter your password to log in.  Since this is the first time this user has logged in, windows will have to set things up for a few minutes and then you can continue.
  3. Next browse to the folder we’re going to put the personal dropbox in.  So that it gets included in your computer backup we recommend that it be in C:\users\youraccount\personaldropbox.  So open file explorer and browse to c:\users\ then open your account folder.  You will be asked to click continue to get permission to access this folder.  When you click continue you will be asked to enter an administrator password.  You should enter the password for (and choose the account of) your normal user account (assuming that user is the administrator of the computer – which is normally the case (if it isn’t the case you would already be aware of this!).  Once you have been granted permission and can see the contents of the folder, click on the Home ribbon and click NEW FOLDER.  Type personaldropbox as the new folder name and press enter.
  4. Before we started you found the dropbox installation software.  Now it is time to use it.  You need to install dropbox for this second user account – just run the installer as normal.  Note that if you install dropbox using an installer foun d in the dropbox program files folder described earlier, it will be a silent installer.  So after a little while, go to your start menu and type dropbox.  If it appears then the installation is complete and you can run it. (on current versions of dropbox on Windows 10 this can be very quick)
  5. The first time you run dropbox it will try to connect to the dropbox servers and then realise that it doesn’t hve an account yet, and will then bring up dropbox setup and ask you to log in.  Log in using your personal dropbox account.
  6. Once you have successfully logged into dropbox,you need to change where it stores its’ files.  Look in the system tray (this is the bit next to the clock on your computer) and you should find the dropbox icon.  Click on it.  A window will pop up.  Click on the cog/gear icon in the top right of the window, and click preferences.  This will open a new Window.  Click on the Account icon on this window.  The first item below that it in the window will be “Location” – click MOVE to change the location.
  7. Click on “This PC” in the list of locations, then click on the C: drive, then users, then your account name, then the personaldropbox folder we created earlier.  Then press OK.  You will then be asked to confirm you are moving the dropbox folder to c:\users\youraccount\personaldropbox\dropbox.  Press OK, Then Press OK again.  This will successfully relocate the folder.
  8. press WINDOWS-X and choose “Shutdown or sign out”, and then “sign out”.  Then log in as your normal account again.

Step 3: Hide the personaldropbox Windows account

  1. There’s no need to have the personaldropbox user account listed when you log onto Windows, so we’ll hide it now.  Right click on this link and choose save link as hidepersonaldropboxacct.reg (it doesn’t matter where you save this as long as you can find it – you need it only once)
  2. Double click on the file you just downloaded to run it.  You will be asked to confirm that you really want to make changes to the registry (yes you do).  Then it will tell you it has successfully made the changes.  Now the personaldropbox account will not be visible at login time.

Step 4: setup the second dropbox to upgrade and run

  1. Right click on this link and choose save link as pdropboxupdateandrun.bat in your normal documents folder.
  2. Open File explorer and browse to c:\users\personaldropbox.  When you try to open personaldropbox you will be told you don’t have permission, click continue to get access to the folder.  Do this.  Now you have the necessary permissions to setup dropbox to run for the personaldropbox user.
  3. Press WINDOWS-X and select Computer Management from the menu that appears.  Then select Task Scheduler from the System Tools list.  Then wait while the middle pane of the Window updates to show a list of your tasks.  Then click create basic task (on the right hand side under “Actions”), and wait for the popup window to appear.
  4. Enter “Personal dropbox” as the name.  You can put a description if you want.  Then press NEXT.  For when you want the task to start, choose When I log on.  Then press NEXT.  What action should be Start a program.  Then press NEXT.  For program/script, press BROWSE and browse to the location where you saved pdropboxupdateandrun.bat above (it should be your documents folder).  When you find it, select pdropboxupdateandrun.bat and click OPEN.  Then press NEXT.  Tick the box near the bottom of the window that says “Open the properties dialog for this task when I click FINISH“.  Then click FINISH.
  5. After a moment or so the current dialog window will close and the task properties dialog window will open.  Go to the conditions tab and remove the tick in the power section next to Start the task only if the computer is on AC power.  Then go to the settings tab and add a tick next to Run the task as soon as possible after a scheduled start is missed, then remove the tick next to Stop the task if it runs longer than 3 days
  6. Now in the centre pane of computer management, scroll down so that you can see the active tasks.  Click on the list in the active task box and type “per” without the quotes.  You should see the personaldropbox task.  Double click on it and the window will change.  In the ACTIONS list you will see RUN underneath the heading “Selected item”.  Click on run.  It will open a black window and will ask you to enter the password for personaldropbox.  This is the password for the personaldropbox user account in Windows (not the personal dropbox dropbox account).  If you followed our instructions you would have made this the same as your normal windows account password.  Type this now.
  7. Now the second dropbox should start and should appear in the system tray next to the clock.  You shouldn’t be asked for the password next time you restart your computer – it should all be automatic.
  8. You can close any of the open windows at this time as you don’t need them any more.

Step 5: Get access to the personal dropbox

  1. To see your personal dropbox you can’t double click on the dropbox icon for it on the system tray like you would for your normal dropbox icon as it won’t work (you will have two icons.  This would normally be the second one), or you can open file explorer and browse to c:\users\your account\personaldropbox\dropbox or you can create a shortcut to it and place the shortcut on your desktop.
  2. If you want a shortcut on your desktop go up a folder to c:\users\youraccount\personaldropbox and right click on dropbox.  From the small menu that appears, choose Send to, Desktop (create shortcut).  Now go to your desktop and find the shortcut and rename it to personaldropbox or something else that will make sense to you.

Finished: Congratulations!

(The following sources are acknowledged as references when preparing these instructions: http://semi-legitimate.com/blog/item/multiple-dropbox-instances-on-windows-7, http://winaero.com/blog/how-to-hide-user-accounts-from-the-login-screen-in-windows-8-1/)

Note: If you ever need to change the password on your personaldropbox windows user account press Windows -X and choose “Command Prompt (Admin)” from the menu.  A command prompt window will open.  If you type NET USER at that command prompt and press enter you will see both your user accounts.  Now that you remember the exact name of your second user account you can change the password by typing NET USER the_name_of_the_second_user_account *
This command says change the password of that account by prompting you for it – so it will ask you for the new password (the same as your primary account) and then will ask you to confirm it, then it will confirm that it has changed the password for you.

Mac instructions

There is a method to do this using a program called dropbox encore.  We don’t recommend this method as it has a documented problem when dropbox automatically upgrades to a newer version where dropbox no longer runs and you have to manually reinstall it.  This doesn’t seem very practical in a country where downloads are slow and you therefore want the upgrade to work the first time rather than having to download it manually and reinstall after it has already automatically downloaded an update and tried to install it for you.

Better alternatives are therefore:

http://theterran.squarespace.com/blog/2012/6/14/use-two-dropbox-accounts-on-one-computer.html – nice guide with pictures. Make sure you read through to the end to make the second dropbox automatically start every time you start your computer.  At the end of the instructions he also advises a setting change that will allow you to easily tell the two dropbox icons on your computer apart.

http://lifehacker.com/5971204/run-multiple-dropbox-accounts-on-one-computer – two approaches given but not with pictures (the first approach is very similar to the link above that does have pictures).  Make sure you read the part about making the second dropbox automatically start every time you start your computer.

 

How do I tell the “alternate” Dropbox apart? 

If you are running Windows, the second dropbox icon will appear on the system tray next to the first one (near your clock).  If you are running the standard Ubuntu desktop environment or Mac OS X, you should see a second Dropbox icon appear in the indicator panel in the top-right corner of the screen. The way to tell them apart is to look at the “Dropbox location” on the “Advanced” tab in the Dropbox preferences, or just choose “Open Dropbox Folder” from the panel indicator menu.  On Windows the second one will always be the personal one because we are starting it later than the first one.

 

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