Dropbox stuck on sync or index

Agreed on the hung-up-on-a-file aspect, but the tricky part is which one? 

The DB tech support staff pointed out a couple files that they noticed were causing issues in ours logs; one of which was definitely problematic, and while its removal did fix one sync issue that we had been experiencing, it didn't fix this specific larger issue. The other files were seemingly quite random, innocuous files that had just been generated.

I'd love to be able to pick through the sync logs myself to see if I can identify any patterns in particular that coincide with any internal/company workflows - i,e, are their certain file types that struggle more than others, certain workstations/users, that sort of thing - but at the moment as users we don't have access to our own sync logs.

I've emailed the staff to see if they can send us copies of the logs for one particular machine that experienced the issue on two specific days; hopefully that will help us track down the issue.

Are you still getting this problem?

About 3 days ago Dropbox updated to 116.4.368, and so far our Dropbox hasn't hung up on the sync.

I even changed back to the system where I put in a file to be processed every 15 minutes, which caused it to hang up more often, and so far (one day) it has hung up.

Note that Walter did get back to me and tell me since the server operating system isn't supported they couldn't look into it further.

Hopefully you/we get lucky.

Not sure; over the past couple months we went through a week or so where the issue didn't occur because we weren't stressing the system; if we can go several weeks without it happening, or proceed through a few high bandwith timeframes where it doesn't occur, then I'll be able to more confidently say it's fixed.

That said - yesterday we discovered another potential cause of the issue - a (very) hidden system file that Windows 10 generates inside our Dropbox due to the fact that we're mounting one of our Dropbox folders as a system drive letter. The file ("System Volume Information") has several layers of heavy permissions protections, so DB tries to sync it but can't - and that might be causing the hangups. If we bypass the permissions and delete the file, Windows will eventually replace it. If we bypass the permissions and let it sync, then we get some 'Conflicted Copy' bugs. 

At the moment the file is deleted on those machines... so if we have success in the short run, it might be because of that, or it might be because of the Dropbox update... only time will tell. 

Thanks for the heads up.  We don't mount any of the folders as a drive.  I can certainly see how that might mess up Dropbox.

The "System Volume Information" is like you say, very much "hidden" and has "protective permissions" on it.

Mounting the folder is definitely not an ideal solution by any standard, but we're between a rock and a hard place when it comes to the workflow requirements of our software and the hardware configurations we have available. It worked for almost a full year, so we're hopeful this last patch remedied things and can get us back to "normal". 

Don't know if this may apply to you.  We have been having a similar problem.  Trying to upload items from Dropbox using a browser.

After about 5 minutes, it would seem to time out and go no farther.  it would sit and spin and never find the files.

I just read a little nugget that if Dropbox is running as a background app, iOS shuts it off after 5 minutes to conserve battery.  Which then keeps Dropbox from maintaining connection.

Our solution was to multitask the browser and Dropbox so they are both considered foreground apps and that stops iOS from shutting off Dropbox.

I don't know if that will help you with your solution or not, but it helped ours.