headless linux server dropbox syncing paused and won't resume

[Nathan & Shelle]

Hi, I have a headless linux vm that has been running dropbox for linux without problems for a year or more.  Suddenly today 'dropbox.py status' returns "syncing paused". I can't seem to find any dropbox command to unpause from the command line.

I've stopped and started the services, rebooted the VM, and verified I'm not out of disk space.  Still always "syncing paused".  There is no Dropbox logging I can find to indicate what's going on.  

Any ideas what could be wrong?

[Nathan & Shelle]

I'm guessing it must be something to do with the removal of support for anything but ext4 file system.  The filesystem dropbox is on is ext3.  I'm running headless on this server and rarely log in, so I never got any kind of warning.

What a mess.  I would really like a way to move the Dropbox folder to a new filesystem without having to spend days resyncing 500+ GB of files.  "Move Dropbox folder" doesn't seem obviously supported for Linux at the command line...

Any tips appreciated.

[Nathan & Shelle · Accepted solution]

Well, I just remounted my existing ext3 filesystem as ext4 by simply changing the type in /etc/fstab and Dropbox started syncing again.  I'll go about the process of fully upgrading to ext4, but that's a quick work around that got all the unsynced files up to Dropbox.  Hope this helps someone else.

[Nathan & Shelle · Accepted solution]

Was able to do the upgrade from ext3 to ext4 very easily since I had Dropbox on its own filesystem that could be unmounted. If Dropbox is on your boot filesystem, you'll have to temporarily boot from a Linux boot image of some sort.

I read a couple tutorials first, but you can do something like this (replace /dev/sdb1 with whatever your device is):

• sudo tune2fs -O extents,uninit_bg,dir_index /dev/sdb1
• umount /dev/sdb1
• sudo fsck -pf /dev/sdb1
  • (this did the actual upgrade and took about 10 mins on my ~500GB Dropbox volume)
• now edit /etc/fstab to change the entry's filesystem type from ext3 to ext4
• remount everything with "sudo mount -a"