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Dropbox is re-syncing my files again?

Dropbox is re-syncing my files again?

Viqhaas M.
New member | Level 1
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Why on earth is this happening ?!? its resyncing everything again nothing has been changed why ?

114 Replies 114

nirwa
Helpful | Level 5
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The only conclusion I have been able to draw is that it is a timing issue:

For some systems the initial handshake with dropbox, using stored credentials, seems to time out. This may be due to different components on your system starting up later than dropbox. It may be a sensible solution (or work around!) to start dropbox manually, when all other startup processes have completed.

Unfortunately, there are no readable log files produced by dropbox, so there is no way to confirm this, but another computer with the same OS(linux, SL7) does not suffer from the problems on the same network, suggesting there is such an interpretation.

alissa914
Collaborator | Level 9
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I've never had this problem.  Are any of you putting your Dropbox folder outside of your personal user folders?  To be honest, I've had nothing but good things with Dropbox lately.  Sure, I dislike the lack of a 2TB option and will run into that ceiling in a few months.... but for now, I put this on my NAS and it doesn't throw me any issues when it syncs over to Dropbox.

 

Any chance you have something reindexing or tagging your files by changing the timestamp of the files?  Maybe a virus scanner doing something or something?.....   I ask because I have it running and it just seems to work quiety over there.  If I moved the folder and relink it, it does the "indexing" or says that it's "downloading" or "uploading" files but all it's doing is "merging" to relink the files to what I have.  

 

I'm not sure I know what everyone's running into but I've had a Dropbox for years and never really run into any major issues.  It even got me out of jam a few times when Amazon Drive randomly deleted 20 videos I had and Dropbox still had the files in its 30 day deletion window so I could restore them.....   maybe I need some help seeing what you're all seeing....

jcarvalho
New member | Level 2
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Hello, I have dropbox on external HD, paid version 1TB.

Everytime I restart my computer or, restart dropbox, it will download everything again, even though nothing changed and everything is there in the disk. It just overwrites everything every reboot.

 

Please don't tell me to reinstall dropbox, again and again, like that anoying "please reinstall dropbox to fix syncing icons" crap, that still shows every time I reinstall.

 

This is dumb and painful, and I can't believe we're talking about some issue with months or years in this forum. Is this service worth to keep or not?

alissa914
Collaborator | Level 9
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I can tell you a solution you won't like... don't use an external drive with Dropbox.

 

I had a Surface 3 with a micro SD card slot and tried using Dropbox.  The Dropbox installer won't let you use it as a drive so the workaround was to map the SD card to an NTFS folder.  Problem is that is often disconnected or lost sync, etc.

 

You shouldn't have a cloud sync application running off an external drive.  I think at one point Microsoft even disabled OneDrive from doing that because it caused all sorts of issues.  But then after enabling that again, OneDrive had to stop its software from using anything but NTFS because exFAT wouldn't record the indexing that OneDrive needed to sync.

 

I'm assuming that if your drive is an external drive that it's not NTFS formatted.  If that's the case, that's really your problem.  Try formatting the drive as NTFS and it may work better, but just in case (as with my Surface 3) that the Dropbox software starts and the drive isn't mounted, Dropbox has an error (and rightfully so) because it can't find the drive.

 

 I think it has to download the files to the NTFS partition itself and that you can't go from a non-NTFS partition to an NTFS one and expect it to work out the box as the indexing required is not present.  I'd start out with a blank NTFS partition there, set your Dropbox to that, and let it sync your files again.  Stop it partially through by closing out and reopening it to see if it retains its progress and the issue is resolved before going through the whole thing.

 

jcarvalho
New member | Level 2
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Ok, that's a good answer since indeed the disk is in exFAT, as we need it to be to be able to open in a mac, if needed.

My laptop only has 256MB SSD, so there's no way I'll put my 1TB dropbox service in it. I mean... I can do it, but I'll have to selectively sync a project at a time to work on it.

So, NTFS would fix this sync issue?

I'll need to rethink this, thanks.

alissa914
Collaborator | Level 9
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That's my understanding from years of using services like this.  An older build of iTunes used to have issues synchronizing files that had some of these types of indexes on them so one way to strip those indexes from an NTFS drive was to copy it to an exFAT drive.  Those indexes always came from OneDrive or Dropbox.  It happened in iTunes when you had the music files outside of your UserProfile folder (i.e. c:\users\admin\ or something.  

 

I don't know if you can read/write on a Mac with NTFS (I heard you can read from it).  If these systems are on a network, you could even get a Synology NAS and set up the cloud sync app on the NAS to sync files to your Dropbox.  From there, you can give both the Mac and the PC access to the network share and then everything is on Dropbox for both machines.

 

But that's if you have them on the same network.  It probably doesn't apply but it's very useful for a shared network.  

 

For that setup, you don't even need the Dropbox software on your machines... you just write the files on the network share and it takes care of the sync.

 

 

Michael L.52
Helpful | Level 6
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To everyone in this thread:

 

I recommend contacting support directly. I did, and after a few days and some emails back and forth, they did solve my problem. 

 

In my case, it had to do with symlinks. Symlinks in Dropbox folder pointing at folders outside of Dropbox caused problems. Copying folders into Dropbox and then symlinking from original location to a Dropbox folder works fine. This is just my case though.

 

Thisterminal command will list all symlinks you may have on Mac:

 

find ~/Dropbox -type l -exec ls -lah {} \;

 

alissa914
Collaborator | Level 9
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OK..... how about if everyone also shares the problem they're running into and support contacts them from here so we can see the result so we don't have to contact support directly?  Isn't that the point of having forums?

 

Having symlinks to folders outside of Dropbox is not a good idea on any PC...  If it's on the same drive, you should do what you said and symlink into Dropbox folder instead of the reverse.  If it's on a different drive, I wouldn't symlink to another drive as that drive can go down and then Dropbox thinks nothing's in it (or some other kind of problem).  

Rosemary U.
Explorer | Level 4
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Mine is doing this too 835,000 files today...   which of course will take more than a day to sync and I have FAST internet.
I am going to look at alternatives.

 

imagined
New member | Level 2
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So, it is nearly the end of 2018, this type of thing seems to still be happening.  For the second time since I've had dropbox, I'm seeing a very long, drawn out re-sync happening.  After a reboot, I was prompted to see if I wanted to have photos and screenshots automatically saved to Dropbox . . . almost as if the software was reinstalled or lost all settings.   I am getting very nervous about unpredicted, unprompted resync's happening with my dropbox files . . . I want to depend on these files being safe.

So, why are these random resync's happening?  

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