Dropbox Backup shows external drive not plugged in even though it is

It started happening  during a sync for BACKUP... it took over 4 days for <1TB of backup from external drive to Dropbox cloud.  Have re-booted and powered down several times to clear, but doesnt help.  Computer shows the external drive as active...

Hey joeking1, can you check your backups page online, to see what if your external drive appears as active and connected there?

I've been dealing with this issue for a few weeks, too.  Windows 10, Dropbox 172.4.7555.

I have Dropbox set to backup two external drives, which are physically a RAID array of 5 drives in a NAS box and setup as RAID through Windows.

It worked fine for months, but suddenly one day a few weeks back I had to restore some files and found that Dropbox was saying to plug in the drives.  They're of course plugged in and working fine.  It had also occurred to me that some files that change regularly on those drives I hadn't seen listed recently in the recent activity shown when clicking the dropbox app icon in the taskbar.
I just found this thread and checked my backup page online per this latest post and to my surprise it -appears- that those files are indeed being backed up.  Files I changed in the past couple days showed their correct last modified date.  So that's good.

But it's still disconcerting that an app being used for important backups doesn't say or understand that it's actually working.
It'd be great to have a fix for this.

I have the same problem with my two Macs.  Running Big Sur on one and Ventura on the other.  The dropbox folder is on my computers and they sync just fine. The external drive that now is not recognized by Dropbox ("not plugged in"  even though it is plugged in) used to back up to around February 21, 2023.  The drive is a Seagate with 2Tb of memory.  I store my Lightroom files on it. I have another drive, a 100 GB Verbatum SSD which has some lightroom files on it. It partially backed up and then stoped.  Right now dropbox is trying to finish backing it up even though it has been disconnected. Note, my computers have no problem accessing both of these external drives. Both drives are formatted with an apple file structure. I formatted a thumb drive with the apple file structure and it seems to run OK on either computer with Dropbox.

Additional.  Some of the files on the external hard drive are also in the dropbox folder on the computer hard drive. Wanted to make sure they were where I wanted them in the cloud before wiping them out on the dropbox folder.  Have NTFS for MAC on one computer (Ventura), (it did not cause a problem in the past) and Paragon (does the same thing) on the other computer.  I have also encountered an error message that dropbox cannot read a file on the external hard drive. I noticed that the Seagate external hard drive is listed on the dropbox app as having many duplicates, none of which have any content.

I have been experiencing a similar issue with Dropbox Backup on my Mac for the past few days.  I thought that restarting might sort this out but it hasn't.

Hey Jaquie D and anyone else having this issue.

Can you hover over your Dropbox icon and let me know what the sync status of the app is and which version you're currently using?

Hi Hannah, the sync status says "Up to date" and the version no. is 182.4.6427.

Thanks 

HI Jaquie D, could you try disconnecting and reconnecting the external drive while the Dropbox desktop application is running, and see if this detects and resumes the backup?

I have done that but Dropbox Backup still says that the drive is unplugged.

Have you made any other changes to the machine, such as updating the OS, or making any changes to the external drive settings?