Take Your Search Game to the Next Level with Dropbox Dash 🚀✨ Curious how it works? Ask us here!
Forum Discussion
Dropbox-lnx.x86_64-218.4.4348 is stuck at "Starting..."
I feel like I have had this issue before, but can't remember the solution. Searching around it seems like there are a lot of similar issues with "Starting..." as dropboxd status and never resolves to fully starting, but I could not find a viable solution other than reinstalling everything and re-sync'ing, which seems cumbersome as I use a lot of selective sync.
Where are the dropbox logs to check to see what is going on and is there a way to stop auto-updating? Previous version was working fine and I find that dropbox often releases buggy updates. Is there a stable stream that clients can sit in for longer without having to update so often?
linux
$ cat VERSION
218.4.4348
I tried running ./dropboxd and got the same behavior but with some console output:
dropbox: load fq extension '/home/demo/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-lnx.x86_64-218.4.4348/cryptography.hazmat.bindings._openssl.abi3.so'
dropbox: load fq extension '/home/demo/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-lnx.x86_64-218.4.4348/cryptography.hazmat.bindings._padding.abi3.so'
dropbox: load fq extension '/home/demo/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-lnx.x86_64-218.4.4348/apex._apex.abi3.so'
dropbox: load fq extension '/home/demo/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-lnx.x86_64-218.4.4348/psutil._psutil_linux.cpython-38-x86_64-linux-gnu.so'
dropbox: load fq extension '/home/demo/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-lnx.x86_64-218.4.4348/psutil._psutil_posix.cpython-38-x86_64-linux-gnu.so'
dropbox: load fq extension '/home/demo/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-lnx.x86_64-218.4.4348/google._upb._message.cpython-38-x86_64-linux-gnu.so'
<frozen zipimport>:259: UserWarning: google.protobuf.service module is deprecated. RPC implementations should provide code generator plugins which generate code specific to the RPC implementation. service.py will be removed in Jan 2025
dropbox: load fq extension '/home/demo/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-lnx.x86_64-218.4.4348/tornado.speedups.cpython-38-x86_64-linux-gnu.so'
dropbox: load fq extension '/home/demo/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-lnx.x86_64-218.4.4348/wrapt._wrappers.cpython-38-x86_64-linux-gnu.so'
dropbox: load fq extension '/home/demo/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-lnx.x86_64-218.4.4348/PyQt5.QtCore.so'
dropbox: load fq extension '/home/demo/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-lnx.x86_64-218.4.4348/PyQt5.sip.so'
dropbox: load fq extension '/home/demo/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-lnx.x86_64-218.4.4348/PyQt5.QtGui.so'
dropbox: load fq extension '/home/demo/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-lnx.x86_64-218.4.4348/PyQt5.QtWidgets.so'
dropbox: load fq extension '/home/demo/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-lnx.x86_64-218.4.4348/PyQt5.QtDBus.so'
"dropbox status" says the same "Starting..."
Any help would be appreciated, thanks.
10 Replies
have tried the directions https://help.dropbox.com/installs/advanced-reinstall for a full nuke on the installation and reinstall:
installed xfce4-indicator-plugin as per https://help.dropbox.com/installs/dropbox-desktop-app-for-linux
changed from fs.inotify.max_user_watches at 500000 (already high) to an absurd 50000000 per https://www.dropboxforum.com/discussions/101001016/dropbox-starting--for-days-on-ubuntu-22-04/739884
ran another dropbox update and am now on 223.4.4909
still have the same problem with "Starting..." and it will either fill the disk up with unreadable logs in .dropbox/logs or eat up all the memory and swap the machine out to death.
is there no information that can help debug this? i am working with support, but the process is slow and everything about dropbox feels like a giant black box with no information
also very annoying that trying to post on this forum results in "content not published" complaining about some forbidden html character, but won't actually tell me what it is!!
have not been able to get this working for a couple months, but was away from this desktop machine. just booted it up and ran:
dropbox update
which got me up to version 222.4.5042, but exhibiting the same behavior, unfortunately. Any ideas on a fix?
I noticed there is a
dropbox exclude list
command which could be handy to extract the list of excluded directories and allow for an easier full removal and reinstall, but when I run it I get:
dropbox exclude list ValueError: no path specified
it probably needs the dropbox daemon running for it to work.
also, none of the content formatting is working to allow me to publish this reply so I have had to strip it.
in ~/.dropbox/logs/3 there are a lot of files and they keep generating new ones even though the program is stalled. these are all data files and can not be read, but 3-4 are created each minute. any way to debug these files to see what is going on?
ah, luck you, seems like a different issue, mine never makes it to the indexing or the sync, just stuck at "Starting..."
Issue resolved itself a few minutes after reporting it. It is worth noting that other servers at the same location were unaffected, even Linux servers.
uname -a
5.4.0-150-generic #167~18.04.1-Ubuntu SMP Wed May 24 00:51:42 UTC 2023 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
dropbox versionDropbox daemon version: 218.4.4348
Dropbox command-line interface version: 2020.03.04
Similar problem here, it appears to work but synchronization does not advance, it always says the same over a period of time (while Internet access is working as I am servicing a remote server):
Sincronizando 52 archivos
Indexando 51 archives...
Subiendo "PiezaB.log"...
Hi Nancy,
Thanks for your reply. I have 101460 items according to the properties. 90308 files, 195 symlinks, 10957 directories according to find command in terminal. I've just noticed that this dropbox process pegs my CPU and then eats memory until it takes over all available memory and then swaps me out until OOM killer takes over and starts killing my other programs. Not sure what's going on here, but I've stopped the process and closed dropbox, it never left the spinning loading icon with "Starting..."
Does your team have any logs or anything to debug? I always sense there is just going to be the common solution of doing the big reinstall, which, as I've mentioned in my first post, is not desirable due to using a lot of selective sync that becomes cumbersome to re-implement. Is there a way to export folders marked for selective sync to a file and re-import that file after reinstalling?
thank you
- Nancy
Dropbox Community Moderator
Thanks for posting on our Community, zephyr707! Welcome back.
I’m afraid that it’s necessary for the Dropbox app to update regularly to the latest app version, not only to have access to the latest features, but for enhanced security, as well.
To check this further though, I’d like you to right-click on your local Dropbox folder and send me a screenshot of its properties. More specifically, I’d like to know if it contains more than 300k files.
Let me know once you have more info.
