Need to see if your shared folder is taking up space on your dropbox 👨💻? Find out how to check here.
Forum Discussion
Solved
Couln't download. Remove incompatible characters from the filename
Recently all of my computer with Dropbox have started showing a sync error "Couln't download. Remove incompatible characters from the filename. e.g. emojis, /\"<>:|?*"
The problem filename isn'...
Hey Roy2010, no worries let me share Sam's response here as well.
Hi everyone,
Sharing an update on the topic: our team is working on adjusting this, and it's expected to roll out in our next Stable Build (V190).
You can check our releases here, and we'll keep you informed on the progress.
Thanks,
Sam
I appreciate your patience on this, thank you!
Megan
Dropbox Community Moderator
Dropbox Community ModeratorHi hzee, definitely keeping a note of this!
Your comments on syncing and how it works in this particular case have been quite helpful, and I will do everything I can to ensure that your voice is heard.
I'll forward your feedback to the appropriate areas so we can continue to improve. Thanks!
I have about 200 files with tildes in them, and like @hzee they haven't caused any problems until today. I'm on 189.4.8395, also on Mac arm 13.6.2. Among these new errors are a couple other files that start with a dot and end in '.swp' like '.test.swp'.
Also, I noticed that dot is listed among the special characters that are not allowed in file names. I hope that doesn't mean all my files with multiple dots will cause problems in the future.
- Megan
Allow me then to share the response here as well:
A change was made recently which surfaces these issues in Dropbox's Sync issues UI, but this specific issue previously existed before that recent change.
When Dropbox on macOS uses File Provider, macOS specifies certain filenames types that they will ignore, including filenames ending in a '~'. This ignore list is built-into macOS. Because of this, Dropbox can't sync files that match one of these ignored filename patterns.
If you have a file that matches this ignore list in your Dropbox on our servers (maybe you uploaded it from a different device for instance), we cannot download that file onto a device running macOS. It is still safe on Dropbox's servers. You can either ignore the warning or you can remove the file from your Dropbox through the website if you don't want to sync it to any of your devices.
But these files were originally stored using a Mac. I've never used a PC. I understand that something has changed, but users should be notified that a change has been made, not surprised with dozens of "errors" suddenly.
- Copying and pasting that “answer” here is not resolving this problem. You’re here to understand and resolve customers’ - who pay lots of $$ and most are long time users- problems. C’mon Dropbox. Get someone on this problem who will interact here with solutions IRT and get this resolved. This prob has been going on for years now. That’s unacceptable. Pointing us to another thread is equally unacceptable.
Megan The claim that this is not a new issue is surprising to me.
I can see these files sync'd on dropbox from years ago. Did File Provider only recently start ignoring files ending in the ~ character? Because I have a file from a year ago that ends in ~ and is in Dropbox in the cloud, but I'm suddenly getting an error about it.
Also, what is the problem with the file .problem.c.swp? The error message suggests that the period character is an "incompatible character", but ... that can't be the case, as many many files have a period in the name. In that case as well, the files are on Dropbox from years ago (2013!) but I suddenly started getting an error message about them last week.
I have a similar problem -- in my case, on Windows 10. A folder that was shared with me long ago contains a few files with ">" characters in their names, which Windows doesn't allow. Those files have never been downloaded to my PC. As a result of the recent Dropbox UI change, I am now receiving alerts, whereas formerly the downloads failed silently. This explanation makes sense to me.
Since the folder was shared with me by someone else, with view-only access, I do not have the option to rename the files.
No problem, I thought. I'll just make that folder online-only, so that it doesn't need to be downloaded to my PC unless I try to access files in that folder from my PC.
This doesn't seem to have had any effect. I am still getting periodically notified that the files can't be downloaded. How can I stop these failing download attempts, other than by unsharing the folder and losing access to it entirely?
The comment that 'this is not a new issue' is missing a bit of context. A few months ago, Dropbox switched from using its own file handling routine to using the MacOS built-in API for cloud storage. Before this point, Dropbox could sync files ending with tilde on Mac. When the switch happened, any files with tildes seem to have been copied to the new folder, but due to the limitations of the MacOS cloud storage API, they cannot be modified by Dropbox anymore. (And new ones cannot be downloaded or uploaded)
So this is not a new issue in that it's older than two weeks when hzee asked the question, but it is a new issue as of a couple months ago when Dropbox switched APIs on Mac. This explains why some people like dsspiegel successfully created tilde files a year ago, because at that time Dropbox was not using File Provider yet.
The change that appeared two weeks ago seems to have been an updated notification system that detects and correctly notifies us of this issue (perhaps along with some others like the ones EatCroc3 mentions). In my case though, after ignoring the issues from the desktop app they haven't bothered me since.
And regarding the .something.swp files, I am guessing that File Provider specifically disallows files that follow the form .*.swp because I was able to successfully create files that started with a . or ended with .swp but not both. It also seems that tildes are allowed in file names unless they are at the end of the filename for some reason.
I think we need to take these complaints to Apple because they are almost certainly pressuring services like Dropbox to use File Provider and also the ones imposing these weird restrictions 🙂
About View, download, and export
Need support with viewing, downloading, and exporting files and folders from your Dropbox account? Find help from the Dropbox Community.
