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Forum Discussion
My Dropbox app is stuck syncing files on Windows 11 after an advanced reinstall.
Device
Desktop PC
Operating System/Browser (if using the web)
Windows 11 Pro
Dropbox App Version (if using the app)
237.4.5655
My desktop app has been stuck syncing for about a week. We ran out of space on our work Dropbox network (80TB used). I freed up around 20TB of space and all PC's on the network apart from mine successfully (after some time) synced the changes. Mine however was stuck at 5.5 million files syncing. I left it to do its thing for several days with no change.
So I followed the "advanced reinstall" instructions on this page https://help.dropbox.com/installs/advanced-reinstall. The reinstall was successful and it seemed as though things were moving again. However for the last few days I've been stuck with between 12,000 and 16,000 files syncing. The number gradually goes up day to day. I'm working on Dropbox still, as are my colleagues so this may be why. I have to manually download my colleagues files and place them where they should be syncing before using them.
When I hover my mouse over the DB icon in the system tray it says its downloading the 16k files, uploading around 40 files. But very little download up upload bandwidth is actually being used. I have a gigabit connection so I don't believe its actually doing much at all on the network.
How can I fix this? We have around 60TB of files on our DB network and I have around 500GB of that synced at any given time.
Thanks for any assistance!
18 Replies
- Walter
Dropbox Community Moderator
Can you try it out in smaller batches or even with a relatively small folder as a test Jasper B.3?
Sure. I unselected every folder in selective sync to get beneath the 300K limit as advised, but the folders are not being removed. They are unticked in the sync settings, but they remain on the drive.
- Jay
HI Jasper B.3, could you let us know what you mean when the settings aren't being applied when using selective sync?
Are you getting an error message in the Dropbox desktop application?
I'm in the same scenario here, although on a slightly smaller scale (only 4TB, but 880Gb synced).
I've been trying to selective sync myself back to zero folders synced, but it won't even apply those settings anymore so i've been advised to reinstall the software. Five straight days of system crashes due to dropbox log files filling up my boot drive and causing system instability, and no end to the sync in sight. It's really affecting my business at the moment.
- Jay
Hi PebbleNick, thanks for the details. In order to look into this matter in more detail, I'd recommend contacting the support team directly for them to investigate further.
I looked at the 300k files article you linked. Its saying that having more the 300k files synced locally is bad for performance. I cant tell how many I have synced exactly. But just to be clear I don't have our entire 60TB 7.8 million file network synced.
Also my machine is pretty high spec which the article points out makes a difference.
Definitely more than 300k files. We deal with millions of files for video production/animation. I have the properties up now and its past 1 million with about 50TB still to go through. So I'd guess a very large amount in total basically.
We've been using Dropbox for years now though with this number of files and not had an issue this disruptive before.
EDIT: 7.8 million files if the exact number is important 🙂
- Nancy
Welcome to our Community, PebbleNick! Thanks for your post.
Can you right-click on your Dropbox folder directly and go to its Properties? I’d like you to confirm the number of files that are currently saved within.
I’m mostly asking because having more than 300k files stored within the Dropbox folder can cause performance issues to the desktop app. So, if you have a significantly larger number of files saved there at the moment, this could explain the issue you’re having. Of course, this is only a limitation that applies to the desktop app and not the Dropbox website.
Let me know what you find, and we’ll go from there.
