Forum Discussion

planimal's avatar
planimal
Explorer | Level 3
6 months ago

Backed up external drive with 795 GB of files shows 620 GB when fully backed up

Dropbox backup seems unable to properly read file system of external ExFAT drive. Drive has 795 GB in use—but for first few days of backup, Dropbox believed drive had 50 GB of data, then 70, then 100...
desktop
Dropbox Backup
Mac
planimal's avatar
planimal
Explorer | Level 3
6 months ago


- All folders have always been selected for backup.
- Drive was radically misreporting size and completion level for many days before seemingly settling at current value (and I suspect I could trigger it to re-evaluate and arrive at yet a new number and completion goal again—I did so in past by adding small token text files to the drive.)
- I believe Dropbox team should have all necessary information to repeat experiment on your end.

Perhaps more helpful to view my correspondence as less of a help question than a bug report—this system is, I think, broken. I don't see how customers be confident of total backup when system is regularly mis-reporting the amount to back up and the completion percentage / "Done" state.

Update: I decided to try the old trick of adding new files to drive to see if would trigger a recalculation, and unfortunately this time result was even worse—Backup continues to insist drive is "done" and fully backed up as of 6 days ago. Does not acknowledge there are new files on the drive at all, even after quitting Dropbox, unmounting and remounting drive, and restarting Dropbox, and even explicitly demanding that it "backup now". From my perspective, app needs to revisit how it queries disk usage and size so is not missing things.

Hannah's avatar
Hannah
Icon for Dropbox Community Moderator rankDropbox Community Moderator
6 months ago

Thanks for the reply and the update, planimal.

Just to confirm, is the Dropbox desktop app syncing as normal otherwise? Like, if you add a file to your local Dropbox folder, does it sync to your account online?

  • planimal's avatar
    planimal
    Explorer | Level 3
    6 months ago

    yes, regular functionality is fine, I just believe issue with Dropbox Backup product.

    • Hannah's avatar
      Hannah
      Icon for Dropbox Community Moderator rankDropbox Community Moderator
      6 months ago

      I see, planimal, no worries, your feedback is noted and I just reached out to you via email, in case you'd like to look further into this.

About Create, upload, and share

Find help to solve issues with creating, uploading, and sharing files and folders in Dropbox. Get support and advice 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!