Some of my files show up as zero bytes

Thanks for getting back to me, Elaine. 

I'm able to open the article on my end, can you try again and let me know what you see?

In any case, to see the version of Dropbox, you need to hover over the small Dropbox icon in your menu bar, at the top of your screen, by the WiFi icon.

Also, are the files in question currently set to 'online-only?

If you right/control click on them and switch them to 'available offline', do you see the same behavior?

Hi @hannah

When I go to Dropbox in finder on my Mac it says zero bytes.  When I try to attach photos to email in Gmail it shows that they have zero bytes.

How do you tell the when using the online version of Dropbox what the bytes are?

I'm using Mac OS Monterey version 12.6

I'm not able to see what version of Dropbox I'm using.  The article you attached doesn't open when I click to see instructions on how to find it on Mac.

Hey elainemorrison, thanks for reaching out to us and sorry to see you're having trouble.

Are you seeing this in the Dropbox folder on your computer or in your online Dropbox as well?

Which macOS version are you using and which version of Dropbox?

You can see the Dropbox version, if you hover your mouse over the Dropbox icon in your menu bar.

Since July I have been unable to access and use the photos I pay to store on Dropbox because it says zero bytes.  This is thousands of dollars of brand photography that is rendered unusable.  I contacted Dropbox a few months ago and was told this is due to an iOs update and Dropbox has no solution.  Have you gotten around to figuring this issue out?  I can't be the only one who has lost access to photos.  Please help.

Hey EE272, thanks for the nudge here.

Are you referring to using the spacebar to do a QuickLook preview? 

And are you able to do this with other files outside the Dropbox folder?

Hi Ive been having the same issue - thousands of files zero bytes - double clicking will load the file but I cannot preview with spacebar. Should I reinstall dropbbox? This is very worrisome 

Sure. This file named 'Gone.txt' still shows up in Dropbox Web search as being 2.01kb and containing these words.

The version history only shows it being created, then moved:

Viewing the file in Dropbox Web shows a completely empty text file:

As does opening it from the (completely synced) Dropbox folder on my Mac:

But opening it up in a Hex editor shows just over 2kb of zeroes:

So either:
- I created this file like this intentionally, for some reason. But if so, why is Dropbox aware of some search metadata that was never in the file (remember there are no changes in the version history)?
Or
- Dropbox had the original file containing the text that we can see in the search metadata, then at some point there was an incident whilst syncing, and Dropbox lost the real data in the file, but still remembers the metadata. I presume Dropbox creates these all-zeroes placeholder files while syncing for the first time, to make sure there's room for the data it's going to fill them in with, as that data is downloaded. Maybe. because this file has never changed in size, there are no reported changes to Dropbox, hence nothing to re-sync/show in the version history. So then at some point, maybe Dropbox Mac has become confused, and believes the all-zeroes version to be the true file? But if so, then there would surely be a version history?

Could you attach a screenshot showing what you're describing?

Hmmm... "so it wouldn't be possible to recover them via Dropbox" sounds a lot like "Dropbox has lost your files"

What I don't understand is that zeroed-out text files still show a preview in the web search view... indicating that there's metadata somewhere. Is there a way to access/download that?

Thanks for the info, antoniojl, it seems that there isn't any other version of the file available on the Dropbox site, so it wouldn't be possible to recover them via Dropbox. 

idontgetoutmuch, what happens if you mark entire folders as available offline? Do the files download in bulk?