Dropbox is not uploading or uploading very slowly

Steven,

I now use Google Drive.  While I still can't max out my gigabit connection, I get 300 - 400 Mbps constantly.

I think the web interface is very good now and the desktop client works just as good as the Dropbox client (just 50x - 100x faster).

Google ain't going anywhere anytime soon.  We can't unfortunately say the same thing about all companies offering cloud storage services.

Cheers

Thanks very much for the reply Jocelyn,  much appreciated. Yes google drive is very good however my work makes us use Google Drive so I can't use it. Apparently you can't have a personal account as well as a business account on the one PC otherwise yes that would definitely be a good solution

Steven,

it also happens that I use Google at work also.  You can have two google accounts on iOS or Android and it works great.  

What I do on my Mac is I share a folder (on my job account) where I put all job related files with my personal account and sync my personal account on my desktop/laptop.

Hope this helps

Hi Jocelyn,

Thanks very much for this tip, I'm definitely going to explore this option.

cheers

Steve

This might be of some use to the rest of you. I have been battling slow upload at several different dropbox for business customers. Two systems in particular had over 1 million files. Yes that too many but historically it worked in a reasonable fashion.  Over the last several months sync stability has been really bad with uploads being the worst.

After much analysis tonight we discovered that Windows Search was fighting against dropbox a lot. We disabled Indexing on the Dropbox directory on both servers; and were instantly able to reach saturation of our outbound Internet connection.

This is a very preliminary finding and needs to be vetted for more hours; but there it is if anyone else wants to test that and see if there is an correlated improvement.

I cannot concur with most other users here. It appears after reading through some of the posts that most users in this thread do not understand even the basics of how packets/data/files are transferred over the internet. Some brought up issues about geographic location (sadly also some of the Dropbox reps who responded here). It has nothing whatsoever to do with how far a user is located from Dropbox's servers. The distance only impacts latency (the time it takes from sending a data packet from point A to point B. It has nothing whatsoever to do with throughput.

I have a pro account and I can upload and download at the maximum my internet connection allows (I am on fiber but throttled at 400mbit/second down and I think 150 or 200 mbit up. I uploaded 350  gigabytes of my data at very fast throughput. I strongly assume that the issue lies with the end users because obviously it does not have anything to do with Dropbox's server when some user experience fast up and downloads.

Having said that maybe here are some suggestions to consider:

* Install the newest dropbox desktop app

* Make sure the desktop app settings are set to unthrottled up and downloads

* Check with your ISP and run speed tests to ensure you actually have access to desired bandwidth. 

I have done extensive research and am absolutely certain that on the retail side Dropbox is the fastest and above all, its sync capabilities are the most stable. Here my findings:

*Google Drive: Much slower uploads, downloads are fast, sync causes lots of errors

* Amazon Cloud Drive:Very slow uploads, faster downloads, no sync features provided (only via third party apps which all did not work in a stable manner, such as oDrive)

* OneDrive: Horribly slow upload spreeds, sync produced couple sync errors

Matthias,

I think the evidence suggests that the upload speed issues are genuine, but they are also intermittent, so maybe you were fortunate enough to do your high-volume uploads during a period when it was working properly.

Several of the people here, including me, posted about experiencing slow upload speeds even though we'd already un-checked throttling and verified through a speed test that we had fast upload bandwidth.  My ISP upload speed at the time of my test was 20 Mbps and I wasn't even to get a 1 Mbps upload speed with Dropbox.

And then, eventually the problem righted itself and I was able to upload at normal speeds, so I went ahead and uploaded everything that I needed to back up, before Dropbox had a chance to go south again.  Now that I have uploaded everything that I need, I only use it a few times a day for automatic incremental backups of certain files, so even if the speed drops back down, I probably won't notice.

Still, the people who never manage to get a period of sustained fast upload speeds, are not getting the service that they paid for, and Dropbox should take their complaints more seriously.

Bennett

＠Bennett, 

Did you perhaps upload via the browser? Because that has generally been slower than through the desktop app. Also, I have used Dropbox for 2.5 years now (albeit only upgraded to the pro version recently), and I have at not one time had sync issues or bandwidth issues, so the argument of intermittent performance does not apply to me either. 

I still believe that such issues you are describing in your latter paragraph are not originating from Dropbox's servers, it makes very little sense assuming such when there are many people who never faced issues over years (!) and at any time of day or night from various places in the world. I have used dropbox when I lived in the States, in Japan, and in Hong Kong. Never had performance issues. 

 Anyway, I am not out here to deny issues some faced, I am out here to give a counter example because unfortunately rarely threads exist in which a service or company is praised. For me not a single other competitor comes even close to the sync accuracy and speeds dropbox offers (to me). I hope those with issues can figure out the problem. 

I just want to chime in, using the latest Desktop candidate build 3.14.2. Upload speed has dramatically improved for me. It's actually using up all my bandwidth. Before it would consistently get capped at 2,400KB/s even with no limiter on. The highest I've seen it spike to was 3,300KB/s. While I do not have an upload speed greater than 100Mbps, uploading to Dropbox using the desktop client is performing at under 90,000KB/s. Which is where my max upload speed is capped at by my ISP. I finished uploading a 600MB file in 38 secs.

Matthias,

I think there are two possible explanations which are consistent with all the evidence:

1)

The first possibility is that it is an intermittent problem with Dropbox's servers, but that most existing users don't notice because they're using Dropbox the same way I am, which is:

- a huge initial upload (70 GB in my case), where if the upload speed is slow, it's a major problem
- thereafter, only incremental uploads when a file is added or changed, so slow speeds are less of an issue and the user might not even notice

So during the most recent flurry of messages on this thread when people were complaining about slow speeds (late December to early January), maybe a lot of their long-time users were also getting slow speeds but just didn't happen to notice because they were only using it for incremental backups at that point, and long ago they had done their initial huge upload during a period when it Dropbox's servers were working.

Were you using Dropbox regularly in late-December-early-January, and do you specifically remember uploading large files on multiple occasions, and observing a fast upload speed as reported by the Dropbox client?

If you did, then you're correct, this indicates it's not a problem with Dropbox's servers, which brings up the second possibility:

2)

And that is that out of all the Dropbox client installs, a certain proportion of the time the client just simply doesn't work properly, even when the user is doing everything right.  Bob P just mentioned that he discovered it was because it was fighting with Windows Search.  Or it could be for some other reason.  But it's still Dropbox's responsibility because it's their client that is not working correctly.

In either case, looking at the messages in this thread from Jeff N. and Encore P. and Bill A. on the first page, and from Ricardo T. and Bob B. on this page if you scroll up a bit, it seems pretty clear that they're all technically informed people who are probably not missing something obvious (in particular, we all un-checked the speed-throttling box and we all ran an upload speed test).  If Dropbox isn't working for people who are that well informed, then it's probably an issue with Dropbox, whether it's the server or the client.