Re: Dropbox asks if I want to remove a document right after I save it

Thanks for the update. This response is very helpful, but I think it is still is only a partial answer. What sort of unsupported action might an application be doing?

It sort of sounds like an application is creating a termporary file and then deleting the temporary file or else moving the temporary file to a different folder. That's the same sort of thing I can do as a user from Windows File Explorer. Does the fact that it's being done by an application instead of by me as the user mean that Dropbox can't support the action? And more importantly, how am I as a user supposed to make an informed response to the pop-up message from Dropbox. I still don't under stand what it's asking me and whether I should respond yes or no.

Jerry

From what I've gathered, the way Windows works, is that when you save a file, the old copy is deleted and a new copy is saved in its place. The changes you made and want to save are not added, so to speak. The entire file is deleted, then saved over. What is happening, is that when the file is 'deleted' in preparation for the save, Dropbox thinks you are deleting the file from Dropbox and wants to know if you want to delete it from all your devices. I always click cancel, because I don't want my files deleted, and I feel this is the safest option.

My husband just told me he's getting the same error message when saving output from his synths to Dropbox--but only on Windows. He's never had the error pop up when he's using the Linux side of his devices. I wonder how many Mac users are getting the same error, or if this is just a Windows thing.

Thanks for the info Walter.

I do appreciate this feature.  These are confusing false positives though--we ask a program to save (or it autosaves), and we get a scary notification that something important is being permanently deleted.  I know the intentions are good, but the customer experience is pretty poor in this common use case.  And the solution is equally poor: disable sync, which isn't an option for me since I have editors and IDEs always open, or disable the feature entirely.

I don't know what the technical constraints are, but asking Dropbox to trust specific applications would be ideal here, so I can whitelist my editors and IDEs to perform these common actions on my behalf, but still get the notification otherwise.  At the very least, a note about this scenario in the popup window would be helpful so that users could understand that it's often not as scary as it sounds.