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utpmg's avatar
utpmg
Helpful | Level 7
2 years ago

Dropbox Backup skipped some files on external drive, MacOS permissions?

I added an external drive to Dropbox Backup a couple of days ago; it was large and took about 16 hours. Seemed to have worked fine, but this morning I was comparing the backup files with my drive and saw some directories hadn't been copied. I never saw any error or alert, but am suspecting it was a permissions issue. These directories are over 15 years old. But I can not find anywhere what the permissions are supposed to be for Dropbox Backup to properly copy these. I changed one to 750 but it still doesn't seem to get picked up in subsequent backups.

Is this a file permissions issue?

Dropbox Backup
Permissions

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  • utpmg's avatar
    utpmg
    Helpful | Level 7
    2 years ago

    Support still hasn't found a solution but I have. Looks like this is indeed related to permissions and other Mac OS file attributes. I opened one of the files (they're all photos) that wasn't getting backed up in Preview; weirdly it said it was "locked" although "Get Info" indicates it is NOT locked.  I ran (in Terminal) ls -al and noticed the succesful directories had an "@" in the final security bit, the failed ones had a "+". Apparently this + means "ACL" which affects permissions which can override standard permissions. (Possibly because these are so old.) So I ran "chmod -RN" on the problem directories and this "unlocked" them and they were picked up by Dropbox Backup on the next run.
    THe most annoying aspect of this is how it fails silently, even though the Dropbox Backup app *knows* it's failing; Once during a backup I put my mouse over the Dropbox icon in the menu bar and saw, very briefly, a message "Indexing "Samsung...os.dbx-external-drive" "Can't update "198503_05" yet it disappeared, the files were skipped, and Dropbox backup status was normal.

  • utpmg's avatar
    utpmg
    Helpful | Level 7
    2 years ago

    Oh, I forgot to say there was one folder i had to change ownership of, it didn't match the others; i think I ran 'chmod g +rx' to put staff in there.

  • Nancy's avatar
    Nancy
    Icon for Dropbox Community Moderator rankDropbox Community Moderator
    2 years ago

    Thanks for the additional info, utpmg! I found your ticket in our system, and I can see our specialists are looking into it. I’ve also left them an internal note with your comments here.

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