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Dropbox Log Files
While looking for something else on my 2 Windows 10 PC's, I noticed that there are several hundred log files located at the path:
C:\ProgramData\Dropbox\Update\Log
These range from 2018 dates...
- Hi td47; thanks for posting in Community and happy Monday!
When you have the desktop app installed and running on your computer, the app updater service's logs are stored in the app's data folders; not within your Dropbox account or Dropbox Folder.
You should be safe to delete them without affecting the app's functionality at all.
As for your suggestion in the end of your post, I'd recommend posting it in the relevant section of our Community so other users who find it useful can up-vote it to show their interest,
Let me know if you have any other questions!
sodaspopThe reason the files have odd characters, is they are compressed or encoded in a proprietary format that ONLY the Dropbox app or its install routines understands. I see NO use for them, as they can be quite old unless you manually delete them. They are NOT readable for users, with any known app, and there is NO normal text (plain-text ) in them.
It just seems like a lot of work to create a file format using Asian characters (I don't know Japanese from Chinese) rather than encrypted binary. And in this case, since it's so unusual (I've never seen it used before), you'd think DB would have a searchable FAQ that explains it. First time I saw it years ago, I thought, "Is that some kind of virus?"
sodaspopI think you are misunderstanding what is going on here. Notepad or Wordpad, when used to try to display compressed or encoded log files (or even binary files), will do its best to "interpret" what it detects/thinks are extended character sets that might be in the file. These extended character sets will most times come out as Asian character sets, it is NOT Dropbox trying to use Chinese or whatever, it is just their own proprietary format. I agree, they are of no use to users though, which is one of the main points of my initial post on this.
Then riddle me this. When your DB does an update, do you get these files in the AppData Local folders, and if you use Notepad to view then, do you also see these Asian language characters? If the files are actually binary, I could see Notepad interpreting then the best it can,but it would seem it would be a mix of binary characters, not 100% these Asian characters. Am I the only one getting these? So far, no one has responded saying , "Yes, we all get these strange files." Doesn't anyone else empty the 01 and 01 folders out? Over time, they would contain hundreds of files.
- Rich
Super User II
sodaspop wrote:
If the files are actually binary, I could see Notepad interpreting then the best it can,but it would seem it would be a mix of binary characters, not 100% these Asian characters.
It's just binary data that Notepad doesn't understand so it uses whatever character sets it has available in the current encoding. If you look at the file in a real text editor and not Notepad, you'll see that there are no Chinese characters.
It's also not 100% Chinese characters. It's a mix of several different character sets all mixed in, including characters that Notepad can't understand (those are the ? characters. The Chinese (and other) characters have nothing to do with the file's content.
