I need to disable syncing in order to save changes in Photoshop.

Hey everyone, thanks for your ongoing reports. 

When you're done with a file associated with the third party apps you are using that result in this error, the best way to resolve this is to save the file and exit the application you were using. Dropbox should then sync the file right away. 

I hope this helps to some extent, but let us know if you have any other questions. Thank you!

This doesn't address files that are not user created, like temp files. In my case, Unity attempts to copy files from one directory to another but fails because Dropbox takes exclusive access.

What's really strange is that I have excluded both directories from sync but Dropbox continues to lock the files.

Set-Content -Path 'C:\Users\<USER\Dropbox\Temp' -Stream com.dropbox.ignored -Value 1

Set-Content -Path 'C:\Users\<USER\Dropbox\Library' -Stream com.dropbox.ignored -Value 1

@Lusil

im sorry but that is an abysmal answer and you have obviously not read the thread,

I am getting the same problems with after effects and cinema 4d- I used to be able to save a project anytime I wanted, 

but now I cant save a file, make a change and then save again- I have to pause the sync to do it. when you're working on large files- this becomes pointless to have dropbox, and just might aswell use the free wetransfer to send myself the file at the end of the day.

what has happened to dropox?

Sorry Lusil Lusil but I can't save and exit every other minute just because drobox stopped working like it used to for years.

I struck a cmd+S every time I make a step forward in my work (mixing audio) wich can be every 30 seconds or every minute. Your proposed solution is not a solution at all.

Almost every time I save the Protools session I get a message like this

Could not save "" because The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process. (32) d:\Dropbox\XXXXXX\YYYYYY\bsbyQTVQyvbpZSBB\.

I have to hit ok and cmd+s again to have the session saved.

Then in the session folder most of the times I'll find an ampty folder named bsbyQTVQyvbpZSBB

I don't know why, but my post was deleted, I believe by accident.

My questions:

- is partial sync feature still part of a Dropbox offering? (it may be for example .psd file format specification change)

- is file locking expected Dropbox behavior?

- is removing file from drive during sync and restoring it once the sync is finished expected Dropbox behavior?

Thanks!

Hey lllama, most likely it got caught up in our spam filter by mistake, apologies for that!

I'm curious what you might be referring to in terms of partial sync, would you mind clarifying that for me a little? Are you referring to only the changes of the file being synced rather than the whole file perhaps?

If that case, this is still how files are synced, where only the edited parts of the files are synced.

For your second question, I can suggest having a look at a previous post of mine here and that thread in general. It seems to be that this issue occurs only when editing within certain apps like Photoshop due to the way the files are saving.

When editing in these apps, you can pause the syncing of the app while the file is open within the app and then resume once you're finished editing.

For your last question, many apps create temp files when editing. Usually this is to help with freeing up memory for other processes on the device. 

If an app creates a temp file during editing, once the file is saved and closed, the app would remove this temporary file and then save these changes to the actual file.

Rather than it being Dropbox, it should be the app you're using that's replacing the file with a temp file, and then deleting the temp file and saving the changes back to the original file once you've finished working on it.

I hope this info helps, let me know if you have any further questions on this!

Daphne, you're missing the point: this behaviour was not occurring earlier. Something was changed around 6 months ago and now it's broken. I know it's your job to shield the engineering team from all the public noise but this is a real bug with real consequences. Namely, the loss of customers like me. We just want someone to fix it, not create excuses for it.

Hey there John M.233!

If you have the chance, please take a look at my post here (the one I linked above) which has some more info on this which should address this for you.

Cheers!

After reading that thread, the blog post, and Joels blog post, there are only three possible scenarios.

1. It's a bug but nobody knows how to fix it.

2. It's a bug and everybody is stalling while trying to get it fixed (going on eight months now).

3. It's not a bug at all but a limitation of how the new sync engine works.

All three scenarios have the same outcome: leaving Dropbox for a competitor that doesn't have this problem. Reliability was the only thing keeping me on a paid plan. Now that it's gone, I have no reason to stay. Maybe one day it will be fixed but that's clearly not today.