How to determine the Dropbox folder location programmatically?

Question

I have a script that is intended to be run by multiple users on multiple computers, and they don\'t all have their Dropbox folders in their respective home directories. I\'d

Answer 1

There is an answer to this on Dropbox Help Center - How can I programmatically find the Dropbox folder paths?

Short version:

Use ~/.dropbox/info.json or %APPDATA%\Dropbox\info.json

Long version:

Access the valid %APPDATA% or %LOCALAPPDATA% location this way:

import os
from pathlib import Path
import json

try:
    json_path = (Path(os.getenv('LOCALAPPDATA'))/'Dropbox'/'info.json').resolve()
except FileNotFoundError:
    json_path = (Path(os.getenv('APPDATA'))/'Dropbox'/'info.json').resolve()

with open(str(json_path)) as f:
    j = json.load(f)

personal_dbox_path = Path(j['personal']['path'])
business_dbox_path = Path(j['business']['path'])

Answer 2

One option is you could go searching for the .dropbox.cache directory which (at least on Mac and Linux) is a hidden folder in the Dropbox directory.

I am fairly certain that Dropbox stores its preferences in an encrypted .dbx container, so extracting it using the same method that Dropbox uses is not trivial.