Forum Discussion

emphyrio's avatar
emphyrio
Helpful | Level 6
3 years ago

Online vs local storage: how to be sure?

Hello,

I would like to know how to be sure that my files are physically present on my local disk drive.

I selected the "Make accessible offline" (not sure about the translation, my computer being in French) setting from the context menu of the Dropbox directory. And I thought everything was ok.

But today, I wanted to copy an entire big directory from my local Dropbox folder to another machine and was surprised to see that Dropbox began to download the files form my account. Exactly as if they were not present on the local drive.

I don't think that's normal.

Hence my question: how to be sure that all my files are all really present on the local drive?

Thank you.

Patrick

desktop
sync

5 Replies

  • Hannah's avatar
    Hannah
    Icon for Dropbox Community Moderator rankDropbox Community Moderator
    3 years ago

    Hey emphyrio, thanks for posting your question today!

     

    Are you currently on a Windows or a Mac computer?

     

    Also, when you switched the files to "available offline", what kind of icon did they get next to them?

     

    And what's the sync status and version of the Dropbox application on your computer? You can hover over your Dropbox icon to see that.

     

    Keep me posted.

  • emphyrio's avatar
    emphyrio
    Helpful | Level 6
    3 years ago

    Hi Hannah,

    Thanks for answering.

     

    I am on a Windows 11 computer.

    I don't know why, but my Dropbox files have no specific icon (I mean nothing showing they are in the Dropbox folder).

    The sync status is "A jour" (Up to date).

    The Dropbox version is 172.3.7538

     

    Does it help?

     

    Emphyrio

     

  • Hannah's avatar
    Hannah
    Icon for Dropbox Community Moderator rankDropbox Community Moderator
    3 years ago

    Thanks for the update here, emphyrio.

     

    It seems you're running the beta version of the Dropbox app, which might be affecting this.

     

    Can you turn off the "early releases" option here and then reinstall the Dropbox app, to see if you get a different behavior?

  • emphyrio's avatar
    emphyrio
    Helpful | Level 6
    3 years ago

    Hello,

    I did it.

    I still don't have any specific icon on most of the files.

    Some of them sometimes appear with an ugly brown box icon, but I don't know why and when.

    I still dont' know how to be sure that a specific file is physically on my local drive or not.

    What am I supposed to see?

  • Hannah's avatar
    Hannah
    Icon for Dropbox Community Moderator rankDropbox Community Moderator
    3 years ago

    Thanks, emphyrio.

     

    The brown box icons are probably OneDrive related, so can you disable OneDrive, to see if that helps with the Dropbox icons too?

     

    If it doesn't, please also follow these steps and let us know how it goes.

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