I am about to install Maverick and before I do that I am going to reformat my macbook air. I use dropbox and have about 15gb of (small) files on it (mainly documents/ebooks).
My question is: Is it possible to backup my Dropbox folder now, reformat my SSD and and install dropbox again. After wish I replace the dropbox folder with my backup without getting Dropbox confused (It might think it are new files? So dropbox could upload them or/and download the same files again).
Does anyone got any experience with this?
It's fine to do this - I have done it myself, but not on OSX.
The Dropbox client will index the files that it finds on your computer and compare them to the ones which are already in your account (on the server). I believe that it uses some kind of hash function to do this - the client creates a small hash value for each file and then this value is compared to the value on the server. If the value is the same then the client assumes that the file is the same and it does not need to be re-uploaded. However, if you have thousands of files, this can take some time.
Source: https://www.dropbox.com/help/1941/en - "The application will index the files and see that they are the same files in your account."
If you want to do it, when you install Dropbox again, you should sign-in to your account, let it create the Dropbox folder and then click "Pause Syncing" so that it doesn't start downloading everything. Then you should copy the backed-up Dropbox files into the new Dropbox folder and resume syncing.