Have Dropbox stop syncing if Internet is down.

[dbray9]

This morning my my router and Internet were down for 4 hrs due to a power outage.

and DBX was busy synching, what and how I'm not sure--until I killed the process.

I have a new laptop with 8G of ram and an SSD, so I don't truly know what was happening with disk i/o.

But I can speculate.

[Walter]

Hey @dbray9, thanks for posting on our Community.

I'm not quite sure about the issue at hand. Could you elaborate a tad please?

Also, what's the desktop app's exact status as shown in your menu bar/system tray at the moment? 

Thanks so much!

[dbray9]

Hey Walter,

Not sure what I can add, when I hovered the cursor over the dropbox icon in the system tray, it said synching,

but doesn't that mean DBX is trying to upload something? which seems tough to do without internet.

I did notice disk i/o for DBX was at 1-2% and maybe a coincidence, since I moved to SSD, I've never seen a number above 0.

if it matters v 153.4.3932

[Hannah]

Sorry to jump in here, @dbray9.

It's strange that is was trying to sync, when it should have been trying to connect to the internet instead.

Did you restart your computer at that point to see if that helped?

[dbray9]

The power fail /internet down had been  that way for an hour + when I noticed DBX synching and synching

I didn't restart my computer.

I killed the aberrant DBX process.

Some weeks ago, had to kill the runaway update process many times when DBX kept trying to update and mindlessly failing, and mindlessly retrying, repeat.

worried it might be more of the same.

just an observation, one drive simply rested saying it was logged out.

I can tell you that I am remote and half a mile from any router but my own. If DBX had asked about nearby networks, it would have learned there were none. Even if there had been, my laptop would not be connected.

Sorry, didn't think to mention remote in my original post.

Perhaps I should change the subject title to say

Have Dropbox stop synching (+other activity??) if the computer isn't connected to a network.

[dbray9]

Further thoughts on the subject.

Been awhile since I've done any system call programming. but why not have DBX

1) check for a connected network

2) if not, sleep having set an interrupt that says "wake when I'm connected to a network"

as I mention it looks like one drive is doing something like that.

it seems reasonable that until a network is connected, about the only activity DBX should be doing is making a list of files that have changed. 

with the power outage event that triggered my suggestion, the last thing I wish is spurious activity that is chewing up battery power.

[Hannah]

Thanks for the update here and your feedback, @dbray9.

I'll make sure your comments are passed along to our team about this, we really appreciate it.

If you happen to come across any issues in the future, let us know!

[dbray9]

Hi Hannah

Does that mean we can expect to see DBX future version

• check for a connected network?
• if none, 
  • set an interrupt saying, wake me when I'm connected.
  • then sleep?

As I say one drive seems to do that, instead of some kind of busy wait.

thx

[Rich]

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@dbray9 wrote:

Does that mean we can expect to see DBX future version ...

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It means she's passed your comments on to the team, nothing more. We won't know if they take action on those comments until a version is released with those changes. They never comment on what is in development or what changes to expect.