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serafinalvarez's avatar
serafinalvarez
Helpful | Level 6
7 years ago
Solved

Dropbox stuck syncing, won't let me delete files

Hello, My Dropbox is taking forever to sync. Over a month now I started having issues when syncing shared files. I could manually upload and download the latest version of a shared file via browser...
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  • serafinalvarez's avatar
    serafinalvarez
    7 years ago

    Hi Jeff,

    After contacting me by email the engineering team at Dropbox deleted the problematic folder themselves.

    The issue was the huge volume of files in that folder (over 2,500,000). What they said is that the current limitation of the Dropbox desktop application is roughly around 300,000 files. I gave them permisition to remove it, and they did so.

    Best,

    Serafin

Jay's avatar
Jay
Icon for Dropbox Community Moderator rankDropbox Community Moderator
7 years ago
Currently, there isn’t a way to start from a ‘clean slate’ on your Dropbox account.
 
Since the Dropbox desktop application is constantly syncing, one thing you can try is to unlink the app itself and then delete the files in batches online.
 
While this can be time consuming, it would prevent the desktop app from syncing deletions as well from its end.
 
When the account is suitably empty, you can relink your Dropbox desktop application again for it to sync the few files you need.
serafinalvarez's avatar
serafinalvarez
Helpful | Level 6
7 years ago

Hi,

Thanks again for your promptness.

I'll try that. Is there an estimated amount of files that I can try to delete per batch? I've tried deleting project folders, but with most of those I tried it says too many files.

Serafin

  • Jay's avatar
    Jay
    Icon for Dropbox Community Moderator rankDropbox Community Moderator
    7 years ago
    The number can vary, so I don’t have an approximate number of files you can delete in one go, sorry.
     
    The best way to start is by deleting subfolders within project folders until you’re able to delete entire projects in one go, and continue from there.
    • serafinalvarez's avatar
      serafinalvarez
      Helpful | Level 6
      7 years ago

      Hi Jay,

      I've been doing that, and so far is quite faster than I expected.

      However, there's one subfolder that I can't delete because it has too many files, but I can't open it either to go deeper and delete smaller batches/subfolders. When clicking on it, an error message appears: "There was a problem completing this request", and it automatically goes back to the main Dropbox folder.
      (*In case it helps, it's in a Unity project folder > Library > Occlusion)

      • Jay's avatar
        Jay
        Icon for Dropbox Community Moderator rankDropbox Community Moderator
        7 years ago
        Just in case, could you try switching browsers to see if this helps? 
         
        Otherwise, use incognito/private browsing mode without any extensions running, and clearing your cache to see if you can access, and then delete that folder.

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