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Some Dropbox folders in Windows Explorer take minutes to refresh
Let me give you an example of what's happening: I am in a Windows Explorer folder that is synced with Dropbox. I click to re-order the items in the folder (e.g. sort by date, sort by duration of music file, etc.) The green progress bar begins and it can take 30 seconds or 2 minutes or 5 minutes to complete. In other words, folder changes or refreshes can take a very long time. This only happens in folders within the Dropbox part of my folder structure, and it appears to be much worse in some sub-folders. I recall contacting Dropbox support a year or two ago (because I have had this for a long time) and they told me to follow a complex process (including registry edits if I recall correctly) to uninstall and reinstall Dropbox and clean up my file structure. It sounded like there was a corruption somewhere. Clearly I didn't want to do this because it's a huge hassle to reinstall and then resync hundreds of thousands of files. Has anyone else seen this problem, and is there a way of fixing it?
11 Replies
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- Megan
Dropbox Staff
Hi Terry H.10, I'd be happy to look into this for you!
Did you notice this behavior consistently throughout all the updates of the app?
Do you also happen to know approximately how many files are syncing locally to your device at the moment? Are they more than the soft limit of 300K?
Lastly, if you could locate your old ticket number reference, from your past communication with our Support, that'd be amazing.
Keep me posted, and we'll take it from there!
Hi Megan
Thanks for the reply.
My Dropbox locally has 256GB and 56,000 files.
It is consistent as in it occurs every day in certain folders. Today for example the green bar in Windows Explorer sat there advancing slowly for 5 minutes, which makes it unusable.
I have found the support thread from Feb 2021. The ticket is Ticket #12007104. Your support wrote to me:
"I’ve taken a look at your account, and there appear to be some issues with the Dropbox software currently installed on your computer. To ensure that the software is working correctly, I’d like you to do a complete reinstall to try to fix the problem. This will not affect or remove the files in your Dropbox folder." ... It then goes on to give those complex instructions including editing the registry, which I didn't want to do at the time! You will see the instructions when you look at the ticket.
I am hoping there is another way around this because uninstalling would involve me resyncing 256GB which is massive.
Thanks
- Hannah
Thanks for the update here, Terry H.10, and sorry to jump in here.
These look like steps to an advanced reinstall of the Dropbox application.
Would you mind checking something, before we try anything else?
Please close/quit the Dropbox application and let me know if the issue persists with the app closed.
