"Go to file" link in sync issue dialog doesn't work

[Quuzuu]

(Win10) I've been having this issue for a month. It pops up every day.

I don't see any problem with the filename, it doesn't contain any special characters, and I don't know which file it's talking about.

When I click "Go to file" nothing happens.

When I try to search the filename on dropbox.com, I got multiple results, but none of them were changed in the recent months.

Any ideas?

[Hannah]

Hey @Quuzuu, thanks for letting us know about this.

Are you able to locate this file in your local Dropbox folder? 

If so, can you just drag it out of Dropbox with your mouse and then drag it back in, to see if that helps?

Let me know what you find.

[Quuzuu]

Hi Hannah, I believe I've made it clear in several sentences in the original post that I was trying to locate the file but was unable to.

[Jay]

Hi @Quuzuu, my colleague mentioned locating it by searching in Explorer directly, since you didn't mention searching there, only on the Dropbox site itself. 

When you do find the files with the same name, could you try their steps to resolve this behavior?

[Quuzuu]

@Jay 

1. As I mentioned, nothing happens when I click "Go to file", and I do not know which file it's talking about. 

2. Below is all the files with this name in my local dropbox folder, ordered by date modified. You can see there were no recently changed ones. And you can also see the semi recent ones are all located inside node_modules, which I have all ignored from syncing.

3. I tried to move out and move back these files as suggested, but it doesn't make the error go away. You probably know, the error message appears as a red exclamation mark in the system tray, and it's not designed to disappear until you view it, so it's not a good indicator of whether the issues was fixed or not. After you view it, however, it'll always go away, even without fix, until it comes back the next day.

4. As the error stated, it's "couldn't download", not "couldn't upload", so it's probably not going to be fixed by local operations anyway.

[Здравко · Accepted solution]

Hi @Quuzuu,

Your "favicon.png" files count isn't so big. So should not be a big task to compare local and online equivalents. While keep open the local search results, try the same with search bar in web interface of your account. Is there some more additional file(s) or time stamp of matching results differs? 🤔

Hope this gives direction.

[Quuzuu]

Thanks @Здравко , I took your advice and compared the online and local files one by one, and was indeed able to find a "favicon.png" online, which was 0 bytes. Deleting it solved the issue.

There are 3 things that the developers could be fixing related to this problem (2 bugs and 1 improvements):

1. clicking the "Go to file" button should work. 

2. the error message shouldn't say "incompatible character", because there's none

3. the error message should display a full path of the file, not just the filename.

[Здравко]

I fully agree with to your suggestions, @Quuzuu! 😉 Let's hope some developer will get impressed... 😁 But you shouldn't rely too much... such thing is very unusual... 🤷 ... unfortunately.

[Jay G.4]

Not that unusual, I have exactly the same problem. and a whole lotta files to go through. it's a constant nag and I have to check it every time to see if some new file I really need is stuck in there.

[Здравко]

Hi @Jay G.4,

That was exactly what I said. Probably you misinterpret the target of word "unusual". Unfortunately, such problems appearing is something usual. 🤦 Unusual is they to get solved by application development team! Problems like this (and not only) stay for years and left unsolved (without any intention to) or got solved after ... years. 🤷 Fast solutions are mostly exceptions (in case the application stops completely).