I need to disable syncing in order to save changes in Photoshop.

[Mattias3]

There seems to be a change in the behavour in file sync. Now Dropbox interupt the saving process of an application (Planimate from InterDynamics). When the software saves it's file, I understand it does this to a temp file with ending .$$$. When the save process is done, and the file is verified, it replaces the orginal file with the new one and change the file ending the the appropriate. This has worked fine with Dropbox for many years. But lately Dropbox interrupt this and "lock" the temp file, making the software fail to save its files. Not very nice. I have to turn off Dropbox every time I do development nowadays. Please revert to a sync method less intrusive. 

[Phillip S.4]

I'm ashamed to admit I briefly dabbled in switching away from Dropbox in 2017 or so. I found that Google Drive and OneDrive both had this issue of locking files to upload them. I do a lot of development in Python and occasionally edit video in Adobe Premiere. I found that Python pip (the package installer), npm (Node.js package installer, and Adobe Premiere all had these weird race conditions and inconsistent problems when trying to save into the sync folders of those services.

Python pip will sometimes create package folders prepended with a tilde (~) character, causing pip freeze to fail (because packages cannot contain a ~ character). This is a side-effect of a temporary package folder being locked in the middle of pip doings its thing.

Adobe Premiere will show an error message about how it failed to save the project file and require you to pick a new location for the file. You will then need to save again and pick the original location and pray it isn't locked this time.

As you can imagine, I stayed with Dropbox after seeing how bad the competitions' clients were. Unfortunately, Dropbox has changed something that makes their client behave this way. That is, Dropbox now behaves as poorly as Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive. This bug appeared around the same time as the Smart Sync feature. I recently disabled the Smart Sync feature for my entire account, but to my dismay, the problem persists.

The problem is not consistent. It seems to be a race condition. If a temporary file gets created and deleted very quickly by a program, there's a chance that Dropbox will have locked the temporary file to upload it, and the program will crash or throw an error when it is unable to delete or rename the file. Sometimes, like in the case of Python pip, a temporary folder gets left behind that causes problems later.

Dropbox, I don't know what you changed around the time that Smart Sync was introduced, but it was a bad idea. Whatever you guys did before to sync files without locking them or causing problems was genius, and did a better job on Windows than even Microsoft themselves.

Perhaps you can make the new client do whatever your legacy client did if a customer turns off Smart Sync? Even if it is available only to Plus and up customers, that would keep us from jumping ship...

[ARealKing]

I still see this problem, and it really frustrating to pause and start Dropbox repeatedly in order to let other software work with their temporary files. Please resolve this outstanding issue. Even worse is that whenever Dropbox is paused, it will take more than 10 minutes to resume its operation next time.

[John M.233]

I believe the file locking "bug" is a side effect from upgrading the backend system. Google Drive and OneDrive have the file locking problem because they were designed to scale very large from the beginning. Now that Dropbox has upgraded their systems to handle large loads, they now have the same problem.

Long story short: get used to it because it's not going away, unless they can achieve what Google and Microsoft could not. I recommend not using Dropbox for "live" files. For most people that means not using Dropbox at all, or any syncing program for that matter. Consider it storage only and forget about collaboration or versioning.

[PatrickWilson]

This is causing me a minor irritation lately, I have about 4-5 apps that this happens with. Is there any solution to this apart from stop syncing DB?

[John M.233]

Not really. If there is a seperate temp directory then you can turn it into a symlink and dropbox will ignore it.

I would like to take this moment however to suggest a new feature that will help with this problem: Sync scheduling. Set it to sync once a minute and 99% of these sharing conflicts go away. It would certainly solve my dilemma of temp files that are created and destroyed almost immediately but the dropbox client keeps grabbing onto them and interfering with the process.

[Patricho]

Sync scheduling is a great suggestion! As you say, that would immediately solve 99% of these occurrences. Once in a while the schedule _could_ coincide with the saving of a temp file, and the problem would occur, but that should be rare enough to not really matter.

[Stamped]

Can anyone recomend a backup software that works like the old Dropbox? I need something that does not impede the rapid creation, renaming, and deletion of temp files. 

If the only option is to pause syncing, then i will be cancelling dropbox, and moving back to an old school external hard drive. If I have to pause syncing, then Dropbox does not offer any benefit over manually creating backups. 

Come on... its 2020. 

[John M.233]

I have used MirrorFolder in the past to great success. Combined with Undelete, you have a pretty potent combo. Undelete keeps unlimited versions of files whether they were deleted, overwritten, or changed in any way.

EDIT: Undelete has changed their pricing to $50/month, so that's not a real option for most people. Mirrorfolder is still great and affordable.

https://www.techsoftpl.com/backup/

https://condusiv.com/products/undelete/

[ARealKing]

I have been thinking of canceling the service too. The new Dropbox is super-slow, and always interfering with temporary files. So it is practically always closed and whenever needed, it takes close to half-hour to start and realize what needs to be synced.

[John M.233]

Well, I solved this problem by switching to mac because this is actually a Windows problem. It works without issue, no matter how many temp files I have open because the mac file system (APFS) doesn't have the file sharing problems NTFS does.

I know this isn't a solution for everybody but if you've been on the fence lately, the new M1 macs are beyond fast.