Smart Sync - Windows Explorer Search Not Working

grahamaikman, I appreciate your desire to help, but it seems as though DropBox representatives have confirmed this problem to be a "known issue" earlier in this very thread.  Its seemingly just taking them a very long time (many months, or longer) to solve this problem.  As those DropBox representatives probably alreay know, the inability to search offline files in Windows makes the (otherwise incredible) "SmartSync" feature pretty worthless.  That is because, if most are your files are offline files, then the only way to find them is to manually plow through all your DropBox files and folders.  Without paying extra for the "SmartSync" feature (as we do), we would have had full search of all of our DropBox files and folders for these past many months.  Hopefully DropBox will solve this problem soon.

Indexing is definitely on.  I will rebuild it, but it is already on.

Hi all,

We are currently working on this issue and I hope to bring you a concrete update soon. At this point all I'm able to share is simply that we're activley persuing a solution here. I'll update more when I have a timeline on the fix.

Many thanks for highlighting here!

Following to get updates on this issue. 

Also having this issue, will be following this thread to keep updated. 

Following this - have the same issue.

Workaround was to locally sync the files, which defeats the purpose of smart sync! :-)

I imagine we can still use the search function on the web version which might at least indicate where a file is stored for easier way of navigating to it in File Explorer... not ideal but a workaround in the meantime.

True, and thank goodness dropbox search online works as well as it does, but realistically I'd probably only do this as a last resort... it means switching to my browser, going to the Dropbox website and logging in if not logged in already, doing the search, then manually navigating to the file folder in Windows where the file I need is.  So not something I'd ever do unless I was desperate.  This is actually such a big issue for me because of the way that I work that it means I'm not using Dropbox at all until it gets resolved.  Back to OneDrive (which I notice continues to improve and also has the equivalent of Smart Sync, but without the additional fee and searching works.)