2025 sparked some incredible conversations across our community 👩💻. Discover the highlights and see what’s ahead in 2026.
Forum Discussion
Re: Since 31/01/22 all the download files become corrupted.
I noticed, since around September/October 2023, downloads really often (8 in 10 times) are interrupted at different size. And just now I remembered this issue. Did you change something again? ...
Greg-DB
Dropbox Community Moderator
Dropbox Community ModeratorI'm not aware of any issues that should be causing problems like that. I'll be happy to help however I can, but I'll need some more information. Please reply with:
- the name and version number of the platform and SDK/library you are using, if any
- the steps to reproduce the issue, including relevant code snippet(s), but don't include any access or refresh token(s)
- the full text of any error or unexpected output
As I wrote here and here, I'm using Magento 1.9.4.2 and many users (let's say 8 in 10) cannot download items because they receive Failed Network Error after undefined amount of time. However, on my side, I wasn't be able to reproduce the issue since the download always worked for me.
- Greg-DB
I see the first thread was about the Dropbox servers switching to using "Transfer-Encoding: chunked", which the client did not handle. We then switched the servers back to not using "Transfer-Encoding: chunked". I just checked and can confirm that the servers are still not using "Transfer-Encoding: chunked" so that doesn't seem to be the issue.
The second thread does sound like the same thing you're asking about again now. I originally took a look in that thread, but unfortunately without a detailed error and without the ability to reproduce the issue, I'm unable to offer much guidance.
To clarify though, when you said "They are able to download the file only providing them the direct Dropbox share link", did you mean that the same users who were seeing this issue could successfully download the same file when using www.dropbox.com or dl.dropboxusercontent.com directly?
Greg-DB wrote:To clarify though, when you said "They are able to download the file only providing them the direct Dropbox share link", did you mean that the same users who were seeing this issue could successfully download the same file when using www.dropbox.com or dl.dropboxusercontent.com directly?
I mean, whenever a customer says he cannot download the file because the download from the link fails, I go to Dropbox, copy the file (in order to prevent mess with the already present share), share it from there, and give him the link. From this latter, the customer is able to download straight away without any errors.
- Greg-DB
Since the error occurs when the user's client is connected to your server, but doesn't occur when connecting directly to Dropbox, it sounds like the issue is related to their connection to your server. Unfortunately, we can't offer much help with that as we don't control your server and don't make Nginx or Apache themselves.
It sounds like the "Failed Network Error" error is coming from the user's browser though (e.g., Chrome), so perhaps, if possible, you could have an affected user inspect the developer tools, (e.g., the Console and Network tab) when this occurs to see if there's any other error information there.
You may also want to check the documentation for Nginx and Apache to see if you can increase the logging level, to potentially get more information about the relevant connections.
Alternatively, you may want to consider configuring your server to instead return a 302 redirect to the Dropbox URL, instead of passing the data through your server.
About Dropbox API Support & Feedback
Find help with the Dropbox API from other developers.
