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Forum Discussion
How can I stop files from syncing?
I, like many other submissions in this community, have started a huge sync which I do not want. I my case I am trying to upload ca 1TB of files, but not sync them. Many of these, ca 1/2, were alre...
Thank you
Yes, I have been using the desktop application. But I am an occasional user of Dropbox, so never appreciated its core concept. I use it primarily to pass large datasets, ~0.5TB, to co-workers.
My data source for this occasion is 1.2TB of images on a hard disc, H:. My local institutional account folders are on C:, a 1 TB SSD. I have part of the institutional Dropbox account on the cloud.
I wanted to copy the 1.2TB to the cloud, which my co-worker would gradually download, and convert into the content of a website. The last thing I want is for those uploaded files to be amended from either end. That would disrupt the conversion process and links to the meta data of the website.
I dragged and dropped the files from H: to the Dropbox account folders shown on C:
After a couple of hours, my PC started seizing up. After a bit of investigation, I discovered that the files were not only being uploaded to the cloud, they were also being downloaded to Dropbox folders on the C: drive, which ran out of space. It needed TreeSize to reveal what files were on which drive. I had to delete the lot and many other folders on the account, then start again.
I could and can not find any way to stop the process. There is no Ctrl/Alt/Del. Somewhere on the forum is a convoluted process involving rebooting the computer. That is what one does when suddenly discovering that the computer is being hacked. There needs to be an obvious and immediate method to stop/correct/reverse errors.
Further investigation revealed that I was not copying the files ("Dropping" them), but syncing them. There is no copy command in Dropbox. But the name is Dropbox, not Syncbox.
It is partly my lack of experience, but partly because the underlying logic is confusing and not coherent. I need to know at a glance which file and version (e.g. date stamp) is on which physical store. If I change a file, I make a conscious decision, which I share with my co-worker, to move that file to the next stage of processing, determined by its physical location. That is the policy I use during the preliminary processing stages from the raw images on my PC in order that the successive changes can be identified and audited. It is extremely disruptive if Dropbox implicitly makes that decision, or by default.
