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For weeks now we have been seeing the same users getting conflicting copies in there group dropbox folders. These users won't ever open these specific files therefore don't understand why the same files constantly have conflicting files.
This is not the only problem users have been complaining that when they've deleted files from dropbox that the next day these files have reappeared again.
Help with this is much appreciated.
Like others on this thread I have a primary computer and use Dropbox to backup to cloud and to a secondary computer. Yet each time I power up the secondary computer and sync with Dropbox I get a number of "conflicted copies" with the name of the secondary computer.
I never work on the Dropbox files on the secondary computer and so this is not a case of conflicting user activity.
The strange thing is that not all my ~66,000 files are marked as conflicted, and not all the files that have been changed since the last sync are marked as conflicted. I cannot detect a pattern in which files are marked as conflicted, although some of them are the very largest ones (which is a real pain as it takes a long time to synchronise them and makes a significant impact on my bandwidth allowance).
I cannot find any automatic process that would be changing the files concerned on the secondary computer
Now I tend to keep a Cygwin window open which I am syncing the secondary computer and periodically run a
find Dropbox -regex '.*conflicted.*' -print0 | xargs -0 rm
But I should not have to!
Hey andrew_s,
Jane
Community Moderator @ Dropbox
dropbox.com/support
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Jane
All my computers are running Dropbox 26.4.24. The primary computer is on Windows 7 Pro and the (two) secondary computers are on Windows 10 Pro.
The conflicted file issue occurs when syncing to either of my secondary computers.
There is no Network Access Server involved. In each case the Dropbox folder is on the main hard disk of the computer involved.
There are no other media or photo systems accessing the Dropbox folder.
The file-types affected are usually a mixture, but the problem often happens with some (but not all) .pst (Outlook) files in a folder of archived copies. However Outlook itself is not running on the secondary machine and the copies on the primary machines are not the live files (which are held outside the Dropbox file tree) but copies taken when Outlook is not running there.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Hey andrew_s,
Jane
Community Moderator @ Dropbox
dropbox.com/support
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JaneA
Please see ticket #5937195
Incidentally one does not get on-screen confirmation when a ticket is accepted, the user is just redirected to the general help pages. So I ended up raising three trouble tickets before email confirmations started to arrive!
Again, your cooperation means a lot to me, I was to glad to work on that with you.
If further help is required, just let me know here.
Jane
Community Moderator @ Dropbox
dropbox.com/support
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We are actually having this issue as well. It varies with Excel and adobe products whether is be photoshop or indesign. The users don't even have to be logged on or working on the folder and conflicting copies will appear. They are all working in seperate folders, all windows 10, and it seems to happen when the machines are syncing when the users first log in for the morning.
We have our machines set to never turn off, never sleep, and users may log out at best.
Hopefully support has some more information why this is happening. Apparently the users here just dealt with it until it got worse over time.
Hey @csharon,
Welcome to the Dropbox Community, thanks for reaching out here about this issue.
Jane
Community Moderator @ Dropbox
dropbox.com/support
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Thanks @csharon
The point "it seems to happen when the machines are syncing when the users first log in for the morning" may be significant. I have tried cancelling the Dropbox process on startup and then manually starting the process after about an hour after login. This seems to give far fewer conflicted files - sometimes none at all.
I also notice that large files seem more likely to be marked as conflicted than smaller ones.
One hypothesis for the observed effect is that there is some other process (Windows Indexer?) that runs on log-in and is *reading* the files. When the Dropbox scanner comes to the file it finds that it is open and so assumes that it is being *modified* - and so marks the local copy as conflicted (since it was opened before the synchronisation has taken place). When the other process closes the file unmodified Dropbox has already put it on the conflicted list.
This hypothesis would also explain why:
It may be that Dropbox needs a better approach to handling files that it finds open while seeking to synchronise?
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