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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 ...
Daphne
Dropbox Community Moderator
Dropbox Community ModeratorHey jordan T.9,
Thanks for getting back to me here with your current process.
If you were to click the Dropbox icon, are you seeing any error messages within the sync status at all?
With issues in the desktop app performance where there are a large number of files syncing, we generally suggest using selective sync to alleviate some of the load on the application. As I mentioned though, the soft limit does depend highly on your current OS and specifications as some computer systems can handle more than others.
Finally, about the email that you received, if you just want to check on that event, I can suggest checking your Events page to see this event. However, as Dropbox sees moves as an addition to the new location and deletion from the original location, I believe that the email may have stemmed from syncing the moves you intially made.
Keep me posted on how it goes - Thanks!
Okay, the syncing kerfuffle is nearly at an end. After endless failures and restarts, the system is somewhat back in sync. Again, for those finding this in the future:
1) Do NOT unlink your account and re-link it if you have files folders out of sync. The re-link process will treat any two folders which were out of sync as unique data sets. The result is that you will have files in both places (the old one, referenced in the Cloud version and the new one, referenced on your local drive). The conflict will result in a s**t-ton of file-duplicates whic you will have to manually de-duplicate (likely my next two days of work). It will also increase your DB volume - both total bytes and total files.
2) If you should be foolish enough to put over 330,000 files on dropbox, never let a Windows PC see the entire database. If you have to move large qualities of files around, do it on the web interface. As much as it sucks, the Dropbox app is unable to efficiently process massive moves and will crash. Repeatedly.
AFAICT - and you can correct me if I'm wrong, Daphne - the Windows app is 32 bit and cannot access datasets in excess of 4GB in size. Dropbox reserves somewhere on the order of 10-12kB of space for file information and tracking. Once you hit 330k files, you've hit the 4GB limit and the app fails. The reason Dropbox is cagey about this is that there the OSX app is 64 bit and Linux has both 32 and 64 bit options, meaning that Windows is the only OS, despite the large numbers of users, which only has a 32 bit app. As a result, even a professional workstation running windows (I'm running a 16 core Xeon with 48GB RAM) cannot process any more files than a single core celeron with 4GB of RAM. And, since the sync process appears to be single-threaded under windows, it can't process appreciably faster either.
I'll end this just by saying that Dropbox is good at warning/preventing you from exceeding your disk quota (2GB/1TB/2TB), but has no ability in the UI to prevent high file-count choking. I would request that Dropbox consider re-working the ability to address large filesets but, in the meantime, add a warning about moving or adding total file counts over 330k. At 2TB space, that's 6MB per file, and it's easy to have a large number of files smaller than that in a typical user account.
- Daphne
Hey jordan T.9,
Thanks for updating me here and giving such a great amount of detail into your findings! I'm sure that this will be helpful to others who might have a similar issue you experienced.
What you mentioned about syncing a directory larger than 300,000 files is indeed helpful too as long as we keep in mind that this is a soft limit. Also, as you know, the post you created seperately for requesting a way for the desktop app to notify you when you reach this many files has been passed along to our dev team too.
Again, thanks for taking the time to provide all this info and I hope you have a great start to the week - Thanks!
Hi Daphne,
While passing information to dev team about this issue, may be it's good to be added the fact that Dropbox don't recognize file move from file copy and delete! This is very important and noted multiple times in the forum, but seems without enough attention from Dropbox side. File moving is generic operation and is very fast while in border on single (Dropbox) folder. Exception from above could be on very specific cases which most of the users will/had never see(n). The Dropbox application count every file move as copy-delete operation, which slow down the work significantly! Probably this is in the base of the current thread issue. If dev team introduce file move recognition and serving it independently, then issues like the current one will never happens again. Even more: network traffic (client and server sides) will decrease (no reupload of already uploaded files).
Hope this can improve the application quality. :wink:
