How to find out what the app is up to?

[Darren R.]

I have two PCs, one which is on all the time, and one of which is turned off and on every few days.

I just turned on the second machine, and it says it is 'Downloading 124,335 files'. Sometimes when I click the Dropbox Taskbar icon a pane opens it tell me it is syncing a similar number of files. Then I am told 'Please wait whilst we check everything is up to date.'

But sometimes I get no response to clicking on the Dropbox Taskbar icon, and at the moment, it seems to be completely stuck: 00 kB/s.

The thing is, I haven't done anything with 124,335 files. Nowhere near. Maybe 100 maximum. So, how do I find out what is going on, and more importantly, how do I stop it?

[Darren R.]

I rebooted.

At first it told me that it was Indexing one file (or Syncing one file depending on where I looked), and I was asked to wait whilst Dropbox checked everything was up to date. The thing is, I know it isn't, because there are about 40 files I'm waiting to appear so I can do some work on them. They're downloadable over the web and are present in the same folder on a different machine, but there is no sign of them in this copy of the folder.

After waiting a few moments of me waiting, it went back to downloading 121,893 files at 0.0 kB/s, which is ridiculous and wrong.

[Jay]

Hi @Darren R., thanks for your message!

Are you a member of any shared folders, or recently added any to your account which could explain the large number of file changes?

Do you see any recent events to this effect? How many files do you have on your Dropbox account approximately?

This will help me assist further!

[Darren R.]

>> Are you a member of any shared folders, or recently added any to your

>> account which could explain the large number of file changes?

I am a member of several shared folders, but none that could explain the large number of file changes. 

>> Do you see any recent events to this effect?

I do see many events listed probably affecting hundreds or maybe even thousands of files in total, but nowhere near 124,000+

>> How many files do you have on your Dropbox account approximately?

Not sure how best to count them but I would think it could be as many as a million.

[Jay]

If you have as many as a million files, then the performance of the desktop app could be affected, so it's possible that it could be related to that.

Regarding the second device, the Dropbox app isn't designed to work on servers, so the amount of support provided would be limited to what is available in this article.