Dropbox silently crashes on Windows

[Aaron C.3]

I've had this problem for years, across multiple versions of Dropbox and Windows:

I start the computer.

Dropbox starts at Windows startup.

All is well - for a while.

Some number of days or weeks later, I'll go to open a file and discover that Dropbox has stopped working.

No Error, no notification, just...no more backup protection, and no idea it happened, or why.

I've filed a ticket with Dropbox, but we haven't solved it yet, so checking to see if anyone in the community has experienced this.

This has happened to me for at least 5 years, like I said across 6 or more different computers. It's just always been "that's the way Dropbox is, you just need to restart it".

I've about had it - this morning I had to restart it on two machines to get a simple file synced.

Anyone got any ideas? Thanks so much.

[Daphne]

Hi there @Aaron C.3, I'm sorry to hear you've been having issues with this!

Would you mind letting me know your ticket number for the case (eg. #1234567) you have open with our Support team so I can check on this from my side?

Also, just so that I can have a better idea of your set up, can you let me know which version of the app you have installed on these devices?

Can you let me know if you have any antivirus software installed on your computer too?

Let me know and we can go from there!

[Aaron C.3]

You bet - thank you!

The ticket is #8966027.

I have .. oh wow. I right-clicked on the Dropbox icon in my taskbar, it brought up the dropbox context menu, but it was completely black. The DB icon disappeared, then after about 5 seconds reappeared. At first it was greyed out, then it had the usual blue updating icon. Maybe it needed to update?

Anyway, I'm on version 104.4.175.

The only antivirus software I have running is Windows Defender.

[Aaron C.3]

One more update: Apparently this opened a new Ticket #11282804 as well.

[Daphne]

Thanks for getting back to me here @Aaron C.3!

After you saw the icon showing the blue syncing icon, are you still noticing the same issue?

[Aaron C.3]

Hi Daphne!

Well, now is the hard part - it can take weeks or months while we wait for it to stop working. 

What will happen is that I'll go to check a file that I know just got edited on another machine, realize I have an old version, check to see if Dropbox is running, and find that the icon is gone. I have to restart it and wait for it to sync again.

So there's not much we can do now but wait. I just verified that it's running on all of our computers.

The next time I noticed that it stopped on one of them, I'll come back and post an update, and we can start looking for logs or whatever.

[Aaron C.3]

Well, that was fast.

My wife's laptop encountered the issue this morning. 9/5/20, around 11 AM, we noticed that an XLS file did not have several entries she had recently added.

We looked, and Dropbox was not running.

The machine had run out of power last night and had to be restarted between my last two posts, but I verified that Dropbox is set to "Start with system startup". (It does NOT have "start the desktop app when dropbox starts" checked - which I think just brings up the UI, correct?)

So here we are - still running into the issue, and losing data because Dropbox is not reliably running all the time.

What should we do next?

[Daphne]

I'm sorry to hear that's still occurring @Aaron C.3.

From what I could see, your last ticket that you mentioned with our Support team was for a slightly different issue and has been closed.

It would be best to continue looking into this through our Support channel alongside some device specific info.

Can you please reply back to the last email from the team to create a new ticket and let me know that ticket number so that I can follow up with you from there?

Just to mention though, if the issue is occurring from your wife's computer, if she's using another account then she would need to reach out to the team from her account. 

Thanks!