Dropbox indicates 'downloading xx files' _forever_

 Thanks for the quick reply Jay

To give some more context:

I indeed know that symlinks can sometimes cause issues. It might even be the root issue here. That being said though, on different machines with identical selective sync settings, identical DB client SW and OS versions,  one machine will get stuck while the other will not.

Only specific thing here was the DB client release, I was indeed using a pre-release one. I have since downgraded to the latest stable version which I am running, on all machines, on macOS 10.14 (18A377a). Oddly enough that _instantly_ resolved the issue so I am quite happy (and appreciative of the suggestion).

That being said, I assume there must be a way to figure out/display what the Dropbox client is trying to achieve by enabling some kind of Debug logging or by knowing which part of the Dropbox specific file attributes you need to look at.

It would make everything so much easier to troubleshoot... Is there really nothing to see such info?

Hi Jay,

I understand such functionality might not currently be available although, the fact that 'sync badges' are overlaid on file icons must indicate there is some kind of mechanism which allows sync status to be obtained (I suspect some kind of attribute). That should allow one to programatically obtain an overview of potentially problematic files...

Whatever may be the case, given how frequent reports of 'permanent syncing' or general sync issues are, it would be nice to consider this for a feature update of some sort.

Users (and often customers!) should be empowered to troubleshoot their system in the event of trouble instead of having to resort to the general 'stop dropbox/unlink/reinstall/ ...' scenarios. It would save a lot of time and effort.

=X

Any news on this? These issues still occur from time to time and are very annoying...

I also have this problem, and its very frustrating.  I am running Windows 10, Dropbox version 85.4.155, it says downloading 317 files and uploading 44 files... I am connected to the interenet and everything seems fine.  Restarting the computer or dropbox doesn't help.  There seems to be little rhyme or reason to the files that won't sync.  Some are pdfs that haven't been touched in years,  in other cases a fold shows as not synched... but all the files inside show as synched (and hidden files are showing).  Any help would be appreciated...

Thanks for joining the discussion here sehamel!

As a first step, would you mind trying the following to see if this does the trick:

1. Click the Dropbox icon in your system tray.
2. Click the profile pic/initials icon in the top right of the window.
3. Choose "Preferences..."
4. Go to the "Account" tab.
5. While holding the Space bar key, click "Fix Hardlinks".

If this doesn't resolve the issue, please follow the steps again and instead click "Fix permissions". The app might need to sync for a while after doing this, so please just keep an eye out for any progress.

Let me know how it goes - thanks!

Thanks for the response,

Unfortunately I got annoyed at this before your fix and I reinstalled and re-linked my account to the desktop app.  It took all night for the computer to rebuild the database and sync, but it fixed the problems.  It did create a handful of "sync error" duplicate files because I had worked on them on another computer, but not too big a deal.  

If there is a next time, I'll try your suggestion first.  Thanks.