Folders and files status icons not working as intended on Windows

Thanks for your post today, Cordeirovitor, and welcome to our Community.

We appreciate you posting about your experience with this, I completely understand your frustration.

Generally, this here is the behavior you're supposed to be seeing when it comes to the syncing icons in your Dropbox folder.

That said, using the email address linked to your Community profile, I was able to locate your ticket and I see that it's with our specialists.

Make sure to keep an eye on the email chain for any updates and, of course, I'll leave the thread open for any other users that might be facing the same issue and have some insight for you.

Thanks!

Yes, I'm having exactly the same problem after Dropbox updated to the new Status approach.

Dropbox now appears to be using the Windows 11 (in my case) OneDrive status icons. OneDrive exhibits the same behaviour, where there is no icon representing folders with mixed online/offline files. The Blue Cloud icon on a folder, in OneDrive, means that the folder contains only online files, or it contains a mix of online/offline files.

Now that Dropbox has adopted the OneDrive status icons, Dropbox is now useless to me like OneDrive. There is no method, now, to see which folders contain files/folders with some offline files like there was with the original Dropbox icons. File Explorer offers no way to do this.

Hey plutogenie, thanks for your post about this and for your feedback; I've passed your comments along to our team.

Just to confirm, is the behavior you're seeing on your end, the expected one after the update of the Dropbox app?

If not, can you send us a screenshot of how the icons appear for you?

Hi Hannah​ 

I think the issue is more about behaviour that Dropbox used to have versus what it has now.

If we consider the following folders and contents as shown below:

All folders now have the Blue Cloud icon. Before the update, Dropbox would have shown a green tick with an outline for the first folder, and also the last folder. The contents of the first folder in the above example looks like:

The third folder looks like the following:

And the subfolder looks like the following:

With the Dropbox behaviour before the update, it was easy to see which folders had any offline files, by making it easy to drill-down as necessary.

But as you can see with the examples above, that is no longer the case. In the first image, there is no way of knowing which folders contain any offline files (or subfolders with offline files) because the icon is exactly the same.

I understand that, since the update, the icons above do conform to the new meaning of the icons at:

https://help.dropbox.com/sync/sync-icons-windows

But the problem is that the Windows/OneDrive meaning of the tick with a green outline (which is what Dropbox now follows) is quite different to the original meaning it had in Dropbox. I assume, unfortunately, that Dropbox no longer has any control over the icons used, or their meaning and behaviour, because this is now in the control of Microsoft, not Dropbox.

In my view, Dropbox's decision to switch to Microsoft's status icons is a step backwards. It means I might as well just use OneDrive now, and no longer use Dropbox. My switch to Dropbox was largely because its status icon approach was different to Microsoft.

What is worse, Dropbox doesn't give users the choice to keep the original status icon approach. The change just happened suddenly, with no warning, and no way to stop the update from occurring. There was no opt-out option.

Hey plutogenie, thanks for letting me know more about this! 

Your feedback regarding our Dropbox desktop application has been very valuable and I will endeavor to make sure your voice is heard.

We listen to your needs because it allows us to fully appreciate how Dropbox fits into and influences your daily routine. I'll forward your feedback to the appropriate areas so we can continue to improve.

If you need something else, please let me know and I will be more than happy to help every step of the way. 

In my case the problem is even worse: I have many folders that I made "available offline" (so full green check filled icon) but some of them just remain with the "cloud" icon even though they are available offline because there is no longer that option in the menu. I went through the folders with the "cloud icon" to check if there was a problem in some file inside a subfolder and in the end all the files in the subfolder with the "cloud icon" had the "full green check icon". So the cloud icon is appearing wrongly in some folders which makes this entire system a bit useless.

Hey AlexandreCruz! 

Have you tried right clicking on the cloud icon folder, and manually making it available offline? 

If this doesn't work, then please try signing out of the app and then back in.

Keep me posted, and we'll take it from there!

Hi Megan.

The folders are available offline, the icon is wrong - when I right click it the option to make it available offline does not appear (unlike other "true" cloud items which are correctly online-only). This happens in some folders without any apparent reason.

I exited the app and entered again and it did not solve the issue.

I just got a message back from the support and the icons are going to be like this, since dropbox updated their windows app using a behavior determined by Microsoft. So, it's a dead end behave like it was on windows explorer. Maybe we can talk to Microsoft about it?💁‍♂️

I've asked the support how to go back to the previous version and when they respond, I'll post the steps here in case someone's having the same problem in the future.

Cordeirovitor wrote:

I've asked the support how to go back to the previous version and when they respond, I'll post the steps here in case someone's having the same problem in the future.

The ability to opt out of the Dropbox for Windows Update can be found in this help article. Just keep in mind that the update is not optional and you will eventually be forced to update again. Dropbox is rolling it out slowly, but it will eventually be rolled out to everyone.