How long does it take to sync?

Hello vin1 ,

It's normal for Dropbox to take forever to do anything.

I am about to cancel my plan completely, because the guys and gals at Dropbox cannot seem to get something as simple as an app startup sorted. I have over 3.5 million files in my dropbox, and it happily synced until Dropbox decided to incorporate all sorts of useless functionality, and oh yes, now you are limited to having approximately 500k files in your dropbox.

Nice, so how do I get my files back? Oh, you have to use the same useless app that sits at Startup forever and a day, and never seems to get finished with what ever it is doing.

Useless!! Useless!! Useless!!

I'm done with Dropbox.

Hey ExDragonUser,

I'd be more than happy to help where I can with the issue you're having. What you mentioned is indeed correct, that the desktop app has a soft limit of syncing around 300,000 files. However, this is indeed a soft limit and it depends highly on your device's specifications, so this is probably why you had success with syncing such a large number of files previously.

We do suggest that you can use selective sync to reduce the overall load on the desktop app which should decrease the startup time that you seem to be having an issue with.

Let me know if you'd like me to assist any further with this by just giving me a nudge here and we'll see what we can do.

Thanks!

I have the same issue. The dropbox used to work fine until they added new features.

You cannot do the selective sync anymore to speed things up. You have to wait for everything to sync for selective sync to work. 

dropbox should add back the functionality where when I m starting dropbox again I can use selective sync up front rather than waiting for more than a week to let everything sync first. 

When I reinstalled dropbox, I lost a week's work thinking everything was syncing and apparently it was not. It said syncing for a week and nothing synced.

I am now trying their smart sync - online only and if it does not sync today, I might well say goodbye to dropbox forever. I always used to say I prefer dropbox over google drive any day, not anymore. Simple was better - more functionality has ruined what was a dream cloud storage.

Thanks for joining us here hsingh78.

When you do a fresh installation of the desktop app, you can choose which folders you would like to sync before the initial sync starts.

There is an option for "Advanced settings" within the first few steps which allows you to choose the location, and selective sync settings.

I hope this helps to some extent, please don't hesitate to give me a shout if you have any issues or questions!