Dropbox Overview

Dropbox is a cloud storage provider. Fivetran supports syncing files from your Dropbox account to your destination. You can sync multiple files either as unique tables or as a single table in your destination.

Featureslink

Setup guidelink

Follow our step-by-step Dropbox setup guide to connect Dropbox with your destination using Fivetran connectors.

Sync overviewlink

The Dropbox connector allows syncing files with both Magic Folder and Cloud-based storage (Merge Mode) strategies.

NOTE: In Magic Folder mode, we do not support syncing files from the root directory https://www.dropbox.com/home of your Dropbox account. You must select a folder in your Dropbox account.

Magic Folderlink

We retrieve all the files from the folder that you specify into your destination.

Each file is synced as a separate table in the destination. For spreadsheet files, we sync each worksheet in the spreadsheet as a unique table in your destination.

We don’t sync empty worksheets. We don’t sync a worksheet if the entire first row of the worksheet is empty. We don’t sync a column if its first row is empty.

We only sync the files inside the specified folder. We ignore nested folders.

Magic Folder mode doesn’t support incremental syncs. We re-import the files during every sync. We use the last modified date of the files to detect changes in the files of your cloud folder. For information about the Magic Folder sync strategy, see our Magic Folder connectors documentation.

Merge Modelink

We retrieve all the files from each folder and all subfolders into a single table into your destination.

We don’t support syncing spreadsheets.

Merge mode supports incremental syncs. For information about the Merge Mode sync strategy, see our Cloud-based storage connectors documentation.

Schema informationlink

Magic Folderlink

We use the file name (without the extension) as the destination table name. For example, a file called sample.csv is synced as SAMPLE table.

For spreadsheet files, we use a combination of the file name and worksheet name as the destination table name. For example, two worksheets called Sheet1 and Sheet2 in a spreadsheet My Workings are synced as MY_WORKINGS_SHEET_1 and MY_WORKINGS_SHEET_2 tables. We use the values present in the first row of the worksheet as the column names in the destination table.

For more information about the schema and table naming rule set, see our naming conventions documentation.

If we find files of the same name but with different extensions in the folder, we check the last modified dates of the files and sync only the least recently modified file.

Merge Modelink

We sync all the rows from all files within a folder and nested folders into a single table name as specified in the setup form.

Sync limitationslink

For Dropbox Business accounts, you can only sync folders in your home namespace.

We only support the .xls, .xlsx, and .xlsm Excel file formats.

We don’t sync hyperlink values from a worksheet.