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Forum Discussion
Having trouble syncing Dropbox on Windows device
I tried to install, and it *seems* to be installing but is incredibly slow. However, I'm really not sure what it's doing. I was forced to move my dropbox installation to a windows computer recently and I was expecting an icon on the taskbar (the bar at the bottom) like the one on the menu bar on the top on a Mac. Every time I go to the start menu and click on dropbox, it spins the cursor with an arrow and circle and then nothing. If I got to the windows explore, I can see *some* files but not all.
More worrying to me is that some of the folders show a green icon , which makes me think the files should be available, but they are empty. All the other folders show the blue symbol, despite me selecting "offline available".
How do I check what folders it thinks should be online and offline and how do I get a progress indicator?
thx
16 Replies
nothing changed after reboot. No dropbox icon, blue or black. Entered "dropbox" in the search bar thing at the bottom left, and an explorer window opened up but still not dropbox icon
- Hannah
Dropbox Community Moderator
Hey davidsi, the next step here would be what Megan suggested earlier; uninstalling the Dropbox app, restarting your computer again and then reinstalling it.
Please try and let us know how it goes.
so I went to clean up the device and start again and noticed something odd .... at first all my directories now had little green icons. So I looked in the directories and saw that it seemed that the files were there. Then, all of a sudden they were not. The icons and the files disappeared in the explorer. HOWEVER, when I open a command window and look at the files, they all seem to be there!
Moreover, in the bottom right of the taskbar, there is a caption icon which I assume is notifications and one of them was a message that a file I added from a different computer had been added to my dropbox.
That file is indeed on this machine.Right now, it seems I have all the files, as I touch folders the green icon disappears but if I wait long enough all the files seem appear in explorer too. It does seem the UX is the issue not the file syncing, albeit that the syncing takes forever
So, bearing in mind I REALLY do not want to reinstall again if I can avoid it, as it took a week for my files to sync, is there a way to make the dropbox desktop work properly without a reinstall or do I just have to accept a crappy user experience.
Once I have all my files locally, does dropbox (on windows at least) only sync if there are changes or does it try and look at each and every file all the time on both device and cloud? I.e. if there is, say one file change on the dropbox cloud, and just one change on this device, will it know to only look at those two files and not check all the files for timestamps? If that is true, I would hope future sync would be a lot faster- Hannah
Hey David, to address your question first, when changes are made to your files, the Dropbox application will only sync the changes to the files in question; it won't re-sync/re-index all your files.
A simple re-indexing will happen if you reinstall the application as well, your files won't get removed and re-synced.
Just to confirm though, since you got a notification that a new file synced, can you please send us a screenshot of your icons on the right side of your system tray, showing that your Dropbox icon is missing?
here you go
- Hannah
Thanks for that, David.
I assume there's no Dropbox icon if you click on the arrow there as well, right?
If that's the case, please try to uninstall the Dropbox app, restart the computer and then reinstall it, this should definitely help with your issue.
