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Forum Discussion
Solved
I created 2.4M files over the limit on the desktop app and now it's stuck syncing.
Application Affected
Dropbox Device
Dell OptiPlex 980 Operating System/Browser (if using the web)
Ubuntu Linux Dropbox App Version (if using the app) v237.4.5655
Question or Issue ...
Hi there,
I followed the instructions to remove the Dropbox Application, and reinstalled it. Everything is back to normal now, which is a huge relief.
I'm a retired software developer, so I have some recommendations.
- Include in your documentation that there's a limit to the total number of files that a user can have in their Dropbox folder. I assumed (heh) that the only limit was the total amount of space. The files I was trying to add had a total space of about 3.2G -- way less than my current 2T limit, so I thought I would be fine. (Narrator: He was not fine.) The status messages also didn't make sense: if you look back on this thread, you can see the application was indexing some random number of files (OK), uploading a few dozen files (OK), and downloading lots of files (What?) Clearly, something Really Bad was going on.
- Add a safety feature that notices that a user has added too many files, and a) automatically pause syncing, and b) let the user know there's a problem. My computer was driven to the rails for 48 hours while the application tried to sync way too many files. I'm very grateful that my hard drive is still alive.
- I made the mistake of mixing my Google authentication with my Dropbox userid/password authentication when logging on to the websites (dropbox.com and dropboxforum.com) -- no doubt confusing the authentication layer. It would follow either login with an SMS verification which worked until .. it didn't, because I'd used it too many times in a particular time period. My Dropbox userid is the same as my Google userid, which may be the source of the problem. I didn't find that the "Send something to the app" feature worked either, but I just have the daemon running, so perhaps that's the issue.Finally, I didn't see any instructions in the Dropbox documentation about deleting the cache to address my problem (and I don't think anyone mentioned it in this thread). I worried that if I did that, the application would break (of course, I would only do this when the application was stopped). That is what I wanted to do -- tell the application, "Look, forget about this directory, it was a mistake. Let's just start over."
Thanks to you and the other mods. Cheers.
Indexing 303,015 files
Uploading 40 files
Downloading 1,353,541 files
At 1914, December 4.
The number of files it's indexing has gone up :/ it's still uploading files (why?) ad I really don't understand why it's *downloading* anything. To quote my step-kid, "I just doesn't make sense!"
Nancy
Dropbox Community Moderator
Dropbox Community ModeratorThanks for the extra info! Let’s try something else then.
If the app is still stuck syncing your files, you can pause its syncing next and move the new files out of your local Dropbox folder.
After that, you can resume syncing once more and wait till the Dropbox app is up to date, before taking any further actions.
When this happens, you can try adding back a small batch of your files, wait till they’re fully synced to your Dropbox account online, and then selectively sync them, if you don’t need them to be stored locally on your Dropbox app.
Once the desktop app is up to date again, you can go ahead and follow the same steps for the next batch of files you want to upload to your Dropbox account.
In any case, the most important thing is to let the Dropbox app become up to date before moving on to the next step and to keep less than 300k files stored within the Dropbox folder, in order to avoid any further syncing/performance issues.
