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My work computer no longer syncs, but Dropbox service/website still knows "viewed" file activity.
I run the desktop (Windows) client on multiple machines. Recently, my work machine's client stopped working in a strange way: all my files changes are stuck in "Waiting to sync..." state, but even th...
Megan
Dropbox Community Moderator
Dropbox Community ModeratorHi sstoneb, welcome to our Community!
Can you please check the sync status of the Dropbox application, to see if there are any error messages there? You can see that by hovering your mouse over the Dropbox icon in your system tray.
Also, can you click on your avatar in the app's preferences and then on the 'View sync issues' option to see if you have anything there?
Let me know and we'll go from there!
I'm now at home on a different machine, but on the problematic machine I have never received an error or notification about a sync problem.
- When I would hover over the tray icon, it indicated that there were uploads and downloads in progress but didn't mention an error or problem.
- When I looked at "view sync issues" earlier today, it said there were no issues.
- When I opened the menu by clicking the tray icon, the sync history tab showed many files in "Waiting to sync..." state.
- The tray icon showed the blue activity badge with the two arrows continuously.
Tomorrow (Tuesday), due to the storm in the northeast, I probably won't be at that machine. But I'll happily try more things on Wednesday if you have any ideas.
- Megan
Hey sstoneb, don't worry and take your time for sure!
Your safety comes first after all.
Once you're back on the device, I'd love to have a few screenshots of your syncing status, and recent activity as shown in the app if possible.
Also, do you have any third party app, like a security app, that could be hindering the syncing process? Could you try temporarily disabling your antivirus? Maybe that will do the trick.
Also, can you right click on your Dropbox folder, and then check its properties to let me know how many files you have there?
Screenshots below. My Dropbox folder on this machine contains a total of 7257 files in 1003 folders, at about 3 GB. I'm a free user with a 3.3 GB allotment.
The files showing "Viewed 2 days ago" were, generally speaking, edited and saved, not simply viewed. It shows the same status for files that I did merely view as for those that I have worked on and resaved.
I discovered today that if I rename a file on my work machine, this immediately gets updated on the Dropbox website, even though it's still unable to upload or download changes to the contents of files or newly-created files. You can see some of that in the activity list above.
The "biblio.pack" file that says it was updated is a configuration file in my LibreOffice user profile, which I keep in Dropbox as a way of syncing my preferences across multiple machines. On the website, it does indeed have a just-updated timestamp as if it were changed. I have no idea what that specific file does and can't check whether its contents truly changed or not. But it's one of several config files that LibreOffice opens and then saves whenever I use it. I don't know if that file's ability to (apparently) update is a useful clue or not!
The only security running is Windows Security, nothing third party. However, since the machine is managed by my workplace IT department I'm not able to disable it for testing. As I mentioned before, my IT hasn't *deliberately* tried to block Dropbox from functioning, but some security change might be responsible anyway. Also, for what it's worth, my Google Drive and OneDrive clients are both working fine.
I suspect the problems are caused by a networking change that's blocking certain sorts of traffic. (My Discord client stopped opening at about the same time because it's unable to update itself, but I can still use the Discord website just fine.) My hope was that you might be able to give some insight into how some activity registers correctly and other activity is blocked, as if they're using different methods. That sort of information could help my IT figure out what is happening and (hopefully!) revert whatever is responsible.
