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

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.

Same issue with CATIA V5R26 CAD software here. Very annoying!

(July 2020 , dropbox Windows Desktop Client v102.4.431, Windows 10 build 2004)

I'm ashamed to admit I briefly dabbled in switching away from Dropbox in 2017 or so. I found that Google Drive and OneDrive both had this issue of locking files to upload them. I do a lot of development in Python and occasionally edit video in Adobe Premiere. I found that Python pip (the package installer), npm (Node.js package installer, and Adobe Premiere all had these weird race conditions and inconsistent problems when trying to save into the sync folders of those services.

Python pip will sometimes create package folders prepended with a tilde (~) character, causing pip freeze to fail (because packages cannot contain a ~ character). This is a side-effect of a temporary package folder being locked in the middle of pip doings its thing.

Adobe Premiere will show an error message about how it failed to save the project file and require you to pick a new location for the file. You will then need to save again and pick the original location and pray it isn't locked this time.

As you can imagine, I stayed with Dropbox after seeing how bad the competitions' clients were. Unfortunately, Dropbox has changed something that makes their client behave this way. That is, Dropbox now behaves as poorly as Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive. This bug appeared around the same time as the Smart Sync feature. I recently disabled the Smart Sync feature for my entire account, but to my dismay, the problem persists.

The problem is not consistent. It seems to be a race condition. If a temporary file gets created and deleted very quickly by a program, there's a chance that Dropbox will have locked the temporary file to upload it, and the program will crash or throw an error when it is unable to delete or rename the file. Sometimes, like in the case of Python pip, a temporary folder gets left behind that causes problems later.

Dropbox, I don't know what you changed around the time that Smart Sync was introduced, but it was a bad idea. Whatever you guys did before to sync files without locking them or causing problems was genius, and did a better job on Windows than even Microsoft themselves.

Perhaps you can make the new client do whatever your legacy client did if a customer turns off Smart Sync? Even if it is available only to Plus and up customers, that would keep us from jumping ship...