Dropbox doesn't sync or update immediately my files (using Ubuntu)

[FranciscoLagos]

I'm using Dropbox in Ubuntu 16.10 and it doesn't sync or update immediately my files after dropping or creating them in my dropbox folder.

It only sync them after restarting Dropbox app.

I've just reinstalled dropbox to the last version (v15.4.22) but the problem remains there.

Thanks in advance for any help!

[Jane]

Hi there flooredatl,

We would like to follow up on that, since it appears that the issue shall be looked into by a specialist on our team. Can you please check the email that we have sent you, in order to get this resolved? 

Thank you in advance!

Kind Regards

[Fearg · Accepted solution]

Hi Francisco,

If you have tried to unlink and relink your account from the Dropbox app on your computer I would recommend making sure that you have no symlinks or anything else interfering with your files in the application.

You may also want to try disabling your anti-virus temporarily to see if this allows any syncing to take place.

[FranciscoLagos]

Thank you very much Jane. The answer from Fearg helped me to solve the problem.

Best!

[FranciscoLagos]

Thank you very much Fearg!

Apparently you were right and the problem was that I had a link to a folder already existing in my dropbox. As soon as I deleted the link the sync started to work normally again.

At least in Ubuntu we normally don't use antivirus, is not necessary.

[tomw]

Hi Fearg,

Experiencing similar issue with dropbox not recognizing changes in the ~/Dropbox/...subfolders on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.  This is a recent occurance and it used to work OK a few weeks(?) ago

Now having any symlinks at all in the folder causes the Dropbox app to not see ANY changes on any files until you pause/un-pause, restart or do something else to trigger a full index.

Use case is I have development folders stored in dropbox to keep in sync across workstations.  Symlinks are created in the node_modules and tmp folders.  I have selective sync set to ignore those folders but it seems dropbox is still looking into them and getting confused.

Finding all symlinks, removing them, and restarting dropbox app made it work much faster and begin

find . -type l -ls

Is there a way to keep dropbox from seeing or telling it to ignore those symlinks so it can go on syncing these folders?