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Why does Dropbox for MacBook keep 'removing' itself?
Hi,
Myself and multiple users in my organisation have an issue where the Dropbox installed App on our MacBooks 'removes itself.
By this, I mean, Dropbox will still be installed, we can navigate VIA finder, however we are suddenly unable to open the files. When we navigate to Dropbox on the menubar, the icon has been removed, but the space for it is still there, when clicking it, it pulls up the Dropbox pop up as normal.
When we go to share files we are presented with the options that can be seen below.
What we have to do is redownload the Dropbox installer and reinstall Dropbox. When the install is done, we dont need to do anything else, no resyncing files etc. It picks up where it left off.. Really weird.
This is happening for people on different versions of MacBooks, different versions of Dropbox etc.
Any advise?
One of the solutions which helped me was, on the offline installer, when its window pops up for you to double click to install, instead of doing the double click, drag and drop the Dropbox Icon into your Apple applications folder instead.
No idea why, but this worked for some of our users.
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Hi - thanks for the suggestion. I have tried this twice already and it took a good while each time as my Dropbox reverted from using the File Provider approach so I had to set that up again. Hours of resyncing and then still the same issue with removing itself.
- Nancy
Dropbox Community Moderator
Can you try an advanced reinstall next, if it’s not something you’ve already tried, marksow?
- Nancy
You’re all set, bkimball90! Please reply to my email, when you see it.
When the app is installed everything works fine. When it 'removes' or 'uninstalls' itself then nothing syncs across devices.
- Nancy
Cool, thanks marksow.
As for the issue with opening files mentioned in the OP, are you getting any specific errors when opening them while the app is running?
If yes, what do you see exactly, and are you only having an issue with online-only files, or files that are locally synced as well (available offline)?
Yes, that would be great. I did another install shortly after my post and everything is working again... for now. I just keep the dmg file in my downloads and reinstall when it starts acting up, which is way too often. I believe we have at least one other Mac user in our company that has had the same issue but not sure if it's as frequent as mine. He's a remote user so I don't often hear from him.
Yes - I have done a full uninstall, restart and reinstall of the app.
Get info is showing:
Personal Dropbox - 1.2GB - 9,602 items
Work Dropbox - 25.87GB - 260,785 items
- Nancy
Sorry to hear that the issue still persists, bkimball90. I can see that your previous ticket was automatically closed by the system, so can I go ahead and log a new one for you instead?
Since we don’t have account visibility on the forum, our support team will need to look into this further.
- Nancy
I see, thanks for the updates marksow! Have you tried any troubleshooting steps so far on your end, like uninstalling the Dropbox app, for example, restarting your computer, and reinstalling Dropbox after that?
Other than that, I’d like to know how many files are currently saved within your local Dropbox folder to make sure they’re not more than 300k, as this can affect the app’s performance sometimes. To double check this, you can right-click on your Dropbox folder directly, go to “Get info” and check the next window that will appear.
I'm still fighting issue but losing and extremely frustrated. I thought I had resolved it over the weekend after months of the issue but it's back. I had removed the Dropbox app and searched and deleted every dropbox file on my hard drive, even my work and personal data folders. This morning, after reinstalling yesterday, the Dropbox app in the Applications folder says it's Zero bytes so it's there but not really. I've reinstalled twice in as many days and it just continues removing itself. Support blamed the fact that I was running a public beta but since macOS 15.5 released, I stopped installing betas. I do see it running in Activity Monitor but I'm guessing if I reboot, it will be gone. I'm running (or trying to) version 224.4.4811. My ticket when I tried getting help in April was 24954650.
