Stable Build 228.4.5567

Hi jeremyklein​ & MarkDrye​,

Thanks for letting is know! Our team is aware of this issue already and it is being investigated as we speak.

I'll hopefully have some news to share soon but thank you again in the meantime for sharing your feedback, the more reports we have, the easier it will be to solve the issue.

Hi Neal​

We are experiencing the same issue with two other clients. We deployed the Dropbox Enterprise Installer, which means updates are handled automatically by Dropbox. Users with the latest version are experiencing the problem. 

We were able to verify via the firewall logs when the downloads started — completely random times. This has now happened to 3 users in the past 2 days. Additionally, some users no longer see the sync icons in Windows, which is also causing confusion.

My question:

Should we revert to the older stable version and deploy the Enterprise Installer there? If so, how does the downgrade behave? Or would it be better to deploy a beta version?

And do you recommend the Enterprise Installer or the regular Dropbox client for businesses? What are the differences in terms of update intervals? We want to avoid such issues in the future...

I too have noticed that the new symbols indicating online only are not accurate.  I have folders that have been selected to have files stored locally, but the symbol indicates online only.  But when going thru the folder and subfolders it appears that in fact the files are stored locally as desired.  Makes it really hard to know if the files are really local or are online only.  This "Stable Build" seems to be anything but stable.

Neal, I too found that the upgrade didn't always respect the online/offline situation beforehand.  Dropbox seemed to be downloading files but the folders were marked as online only in my case.   It's quite laborious to go through and change the status of folders isn't it.  This is part of the reason I went back to the previous version.  

Hi KLRT_KRAG​,

Thanks for letting us know and I'm sorry to hear about that! I've asked internally about why your data would be made available offline spontaneously.

As soon as I have an answer, I'll let you know immediately.

We noticed the same issue — synchronization takes an extremely long time. In addition, data is being made available offline without the command, which, in the case of multiple users, has now led to the hard drive becoming full and the sync being unable to continue.

Hi buddyguy​,

Just for some context as to why this might have happened, we don't provide customer support for another product (i.e. Boxcryptor Classic) which is not from Dropbox.

Since the company that developed this software officially stated that they also don't offer support for Boxcryptor Classic anymore (because it reached its end-of-life), we can only help customers that struggle with .bc files to troubleshoot and find a workaround from the Dropbox side.

I have managed to revert to the previous build.  But the instructions are not very good.  I have tried to explain the whole process here.  This is based on a series of chats with Dropbox Support.

You can opt out of the new version of Dropbox with these steps https://help.dropbox.com/installs/dropbox-for-windows 

What isn't stated in the above link is the process of logging in and out.  It's more than just quitting Dropbox.  You will need to log out of Dropbox and then log back in with these steps here https://help.dropbox.com/account-access/sign-in-out#logoutdesktop

Furthermore, to recreate Dropbox folders you have to delete the old Dropbox folder once you are sure that Dropbox isn't running.  Otherwise you end up with incorrectly named folders etc.  Before you delete any folders, double check that Dropbox isn't running!  

The version number is still 228.4.5567 but there must be an internal switch that disables cloud files.

The new install of (non-cloud-files) Dropbox will download all your folders afresh.  Now here's the interesting bit.  On the non-cloud version, it takes about a tenth of the time to completely recreate your local Dropbox folders compared to using the cloud files version.  I managed to recreate all my folders in 3 hours compared with over a day with the cloud files version.  Yes, the old version is ten times faster!

It completely baffles me that Dropbox is prepared to push an upgrade that reduces sync performance by a factor of ten.  Dropbox admits that "Dropbox is actively working to preserve the reliability and quality of our sync experience along with these changes" which rather implies to me that they know that the reliability and quality of the sync experience is lacking.  

this release has compatibility issues with Boxcryptor Classic. There is a post in integrations titled: "Dropbox's latest update leads to no access to Boxcryptor files. Can't copy or open them."


Is there a fix for this? 

some companies may do it differently, but I've generally been taught to push out releases earlier during the work week so you can resolve any issues that come up. A Friday or weekend release can be more difficult to patch because people are out of the office, or you have buggy fixes from a skeleton crew that isn't performing at 100%.