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Request Id: eb653fb08d0e425eb445cc599c6e9e7d
Dear Dropbox Support, We are encountering an issue when attempting to interact with Dropbox using SqlBak, our database backup software that uploads files to Dropbox as a destination. We would apprec...
DB-Des
Dropbox Engineer
Dropbox EngineerHi Oleg M,
Are you still experiencing issues? If so, please reply with:
- steps to reproduce the issue, including relevant code snippet(s), but don't include any access or refresh token(s)
- additional different 'X-Dropbox-Request-Id' response header values encountering the issue
- the actual text of the error message being returned, if any
Hello,
We may not have expressed ourselves clearly in our previous message.
We are the developers of the software sqlbak.com and sqlbackupandftp.com. This is software for database backups and uploading backups to cloud storage, including Dropbox.
We have thousands of customers using Dropbox without any issues. However, recently, two unrelated customers contacted our support team regarding problems when selecting Dropbox as a storage destination in our application.
We asked these customers to contact your support team, but they were redirected back to us.
To work with Dropbox, we use the .NET library provided by your company.
One of the requests our software executes is a file search request by pattern. This request is necessary to delete old backups.
For our customers experiencing issues, calling the search method from the Dropbox library returns an error (stack trace attached). However, for some reason, the error contains an empty message, so we are unable to determine the cause of the failure.
We cannot reproduce this issue on our end, and 99% of our customers do not experience any problems.
We suspect that it might be related to search requests being executed too frequently or the returned file list being too large, which could lead to Dropbox blocking or throttling these requests. However, we are not sure. If this is indeed the case, could you confirm it? If there are any limits, please specify them, and we will adjust our search API call frequency accordingly.
2025-03-10 11:26:06.1106|WARN|4|SqlBak.Destination.Dropbox.Impl.DropboxFileHandler|ExecuteWithRetry. AttenmpNo: "1"; RetryAfter: "".|Dropbox.Api.ApiException`1[Dropbox.Api.Files.SearchError]
at Dropbox.Api.DropboxRequestHandler.<Dropbox-Api-Stone-ITransport-SendRpcRequestAsync>d__12`3.MoveNext()
--- End of stack trace from previous location where exception was thrown ---
at System.Runtime.ExceptionServices.ExceptionDispatchInfo.Throw()
at SqlBak.Destination.Dropbox.Impl.DropboxFileHandler.ExecuteWithRetry[T](CancellationToken cancellationToken, Func`2 getTask, Int32 ё1retryCount, Func`2 canRetry); Request Id: eb653fb08d0e425eb445cc599c6e9e7d
If you need any additional information, please let us know. We will do our best to provide it both from our side and from our customers (if they consent).
- DB-Des
Without an actual error message it would be hard to know where or why you are being rate limit'ed — if that is the case here.
As general information, regarding rate limits:
The Dropbox API does have a general rate limiting system that applies to all account types, but we don't have specific rate numbers documented for that. Also note that not all responses with a 429 or 503 status code indicate explicit rate limiting, but in any case that you get a response with 429 or 503 status code the best practice is to retry the request, respecting the Retry-After header if given in the response, or using an exponential back-off, if not. It appears as though your implementation is already written to respect the Retry-After header however.
You can also refer to the error documentation and Error Handling Guide for more information.
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