There's a .canary file causing syncing issues on my Dropbox app.

Hi Jay,
I will trie to re-frase my last/former reply:
The only way to avoid the 'canary-issue' was, after installing the stable version, by disabling the update-feature 
Thanks for reminding me the negative consequences of this would be unknown, and entirely at my own risk...
This however does not solve the current problem.
What should I do to reinstate the update-feature?
What happens with the stable version after an update?
Will the 'canary-problem' reappear by leaving that stable version?
Hope you can give me some advise what to do best...

You can re-enable the updates in the services panel. If this doesn't work, you can try manually reinstalling the Dropbox desktop application using this link.

Regarding the canary file, it's possible that it might appear again, as it is created by another program unrelated to Dropbox.

Hi Jay,
Thanks for your reply.
Is my guess correct that these canary-files don't harm the functionability of dropbox?
I cannot trace the origin of the program that creates the canary-files by the way.
Do you have an idea what program does this, or could it be related to Win10?

We can't really know what program this could be coming from, or if it's coming from your computer's OS directly, but you can try quitting or disabling any 3rd party apps that are running on your computer to see if they're somehow causing this file to show up.  

You can start with security or backup/syncing apps and take it from there WokeDucks 

Keep us posted! 

I hope this thread is still active... I'm experiencing the same problem as the original poster. The one-byte .canary file is causing a warning when I do a backup, presumably because it can't be copied. When I try to copy it to my desktop I get error 0x80070185 "the cloud operation was unsuccessful".

I'd respectfully argue with the contention that Dropbox didn't put the .canary file in .dropbox.cache. My observations:

• I deleted the .dropbox.cache folder and then manually disabled the Dropbox services. The folder stayed deleted for several days, and I received no warnings when doing a backup. The next time I restarted the computer, which turned the services back on, the folder, including .canary, came back immediately.
• I then deleted the folder again, and went through the "advanced reinstallation" procedure described above. The folder came back immediately. All the files in the folder have the exact same "date modified".
• In both cases, the .canary file shows the same "sync pending" status it had before. It shows Windows file attributes ALOPUM; I'm not sure what some of these mean.

If that file is coming from somewhere other than Dropbox, then it is pretty certain that Dropbox is copying it to this location. What would cause that?

Thanks for the help.

Hey DerryK! Can you send me a screenshot of the .canary file and its exact filepath on your computer?

Hi, Nancy. Below is the listing of the cache directory along with my attempts to type the contents (which is only one byte anyway). The filepath is

   C:\Users\Derry\Dropbox\.dropbox.cache\.canary

Hi DerryK, are you able to ignore that file in your backup software?

I'll figure that out, and let you know in the morning whether it worked. Thanks.

Jay wrote:

are you able to ignore that file in your backup software?

Ultimately you should be ignoring the entire .dropbox.cache folder. There's no reason to back it up at all.