Forum Discussion

jordan T.9's avatar
jordan T.9
Helpful | Level 6
7 years ago

Local folder structure and online structure is out of sync

tl;dr - I moved a bunch of stuff and started a large upload yesterday. My local DB stopped syncing with the cloud (and seems to be in a connecting/failed sync loop).  If I reinstall dropbox, will it ...
Delete
desktop
sync
Web
Daphne's avatar
Daphne
Icon for Dropbox Community Moderator rankDropbox Community Moderator
7 years ago
Hey there jordan T.9,
 
You should be safe to go ahead with reinstalling the desktop app. When you start up the desktop app again and the app “checks for changes” it will detect where the most recent change was made (desktop folder or website) and sync those changes accordingly.
 
Since you made the move of the folders from the desktop app, and I'm assuming no subsequent changes to the folders via the website, the move made on the desktop Dropbox folder will sync to your account online.
 
In terms of troubleshooting, if you haven’t already I might even suggest a simple reboot of your computer to refresh the desktop app and see if it will be able to progress past the “checking for changes”. 
 
Keep me posted on your progress - Thanks!
  • jordan T.9's avatar
    jordan T.9
    Helpful | Level 6
    7 years ago

    Thanks for the reply. Seeing the DB app drop out and restart multiple times I went ahead and rebooted the machine (just for completeness: Dell Precision 2x8 Core Xeon / 48GB / 2TB SSD / local folders located at c:/dropbox on primary NTFS drive). 

    Right clicking on the Dropbox tray icon now indicates recent activity. There is little/no write activity is noted in the last 24 hours, so I'm going to assume it's scanning. I've got ~960k files (no symlinks, no active database files like .pst/.ost), so it will take some time.  Syncback takes a good 40-60 minutes to scan prior to backup, so I'll just let it run for a while and check back later today. 

    If it chokes or hangs I'll try a re-install of DB; hopefully it was just a hiccup. 

    • Daphne's avatar
      Daphne
      Icon for Dropbox Community Moderator rankDropbox Community Moderator
      7 years ago

      Hey jordan T.9,

      It's good to hear that the app seems to be updating now with recent activity, hopefully you'll see it progressing soon!

      I'll be here ready and waiting should you run into any issues - Cheers!

      • jordan T.9's avatar
        jordan T.9
        Helpful | Level 6
        7 years ago

        For those playing along at home (or finding this in the future); Dropbox appears to be exclusively single threaded for Indexing and has, in 10 hours, indexed roughly 175,000 of the 500,000 files I uploaded. During this time, network activity (even with the 300GB pending upload) has been trivial (in the 5kB/s range. most of which is receive rather than send) so it seems that the processes are serialized.  At this rate, 18 more hours before I can upload anything or see any of the the file structure mirrored throughout my devices. 

        Also, files which have been uploaded from other clients are not yet downloading on my machine, so it's convenient that I took the week off and don't need to collaborate with anyone over DropBox!

About Delete, edit, and organize

Solve issues with deleting, editing, and organizing files and folders in your Dropbox account with support from the Dropbox Community.

The Dropbox Community team is active from Monday to Friday. We try to respond to you as soon as we can, usually within 2 hours.

If you need more help you can view your support options (expected response time for an email or ticket is 24 hours), or contact us on X, Facebook or Instagram.

For more info on available support options for your Dropbox plan, see this article.

If you found the answer to your question in this Community thread, please 'like' the post to say thanks and to let us know it was useful!