Dropbox is stuck syncing after an update, what can I do?

[Shawn B.14]

I have the "Dropbox Plus" subscription and I run the client on 4 computers.

Yesterday (Monday, 13-Jan-2020) I signed onto my desktop (which is always on) and has a full local sync of my dropbox that a number of new files added Saturday had big red Xs on them -- JPEGs I had scanned Saturday and which were in sync to my laptop on Sunday morning.

I checked my other workstation (also always on) and Dropbox wasn't even running.  I launched it, and it pretty immediately ran a "one time update".   Once this completed, it appeared to go into a full-on sync mode, indexing thousands of files and downloading thousands more (my total dropbox footprint is ~17k files, 600 GB of data).  This has been running for 24 hours without making any apparent progress, despite the drive being materially in sync with my first workstation (using BeyondCompare to check).  Plus not enough system activity to indicate any actual indexing or download was taking place.

I paused workstation 2, uninstalled dropbox on workstation 1 and reinstalled it.  Just prior to this, workstation 1 was "stuck" uploading 2 files and downloading 7 files, which it had been on since last night.

Workstation 1 now shows "indexing" for around 8k files and "downloading" for 9k files.  Trouble is, Resource Monitor doesn't show disk activity or network activity for that kind of activity.

What's going on?  I was perfectly in sync as of Saturday morning and over the last 24 hours it's gotten bad.

Oddly, my laptop ("laptop 1") is apparently fine, showing more or less normal sync status as far as I can tell (and is on build 88.4.172).

[PatWard]

Press and hold the space bar and two buttons will appear like magick. It doesn't always happen straight away or first time .. the magick needs coaxing.

[tonyskate]

Sure thing, @Daphne

[Matt F.16]

Another (unfortunate) data point: I just noticed that while my dropbox client is stuck on "Syncing..." (with no numbers) it's actually not only eating CPU (100% on one core), but it's slowly eating ALL 32GB OF RAM! -- until the system kills the process automatically (Ubuntu server).

[10829014.321309] Killed process 13471 (dropbox) total-vm:8584288kB, anon-rss:2173688kB, file-rss:0kB, shmem-rss:0kB

That shows up in the log of /bin/dmesg after Dropbox runs for hours and then dies. All the time it only reports "Syncing..." and the 32GB of system ram slowly gets eaten by the process.

PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND                                            
3242 matt     20   0 4146516 1.350g  38556 S 102.0 35.1  74:28.25 dropbox

I only started the dropbox client again ~2 hours ago, and it's already up to 35% of the server's 32GB of RAM.

[gformenti]

Thanks guys, but still that didnt do anything as well..

[Siwinis]

I've tried the fix hardlinks and fix permissions this weekend. I also tried it right now and it did not resolve the problem. Anymore bright ideas? Thanks.

[marcoross83]

do you have any idea about how long will it take to fix the problem, drpbox staff? very worried about this...

[DarseZ]

@Exis, I think that's the issue, not having clarity around this yet.  If the new version has issues I'd rather just know, so I can backgrade to 87.4.138 for the time being until everything is worked out.

[marianemes]

@DarseZ Exactly!

[marianemes]

@DarseZ Did you just edit your comment? I have it in email and some part is missing.

[DarseZ]

Thanks @Marian, I edited a while back for clarity.  I always see where I could have written something better...after I hit 'reply'...