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How to fix being stuck on Indexing forever loop of death on multi million file DBs after db crash
Ok so I've used Dropbox for almost as long as its existed and recently due to frustration with the never finishing indexing bug I was forced to find out why this kept happening so I could prevent it. Bear with me on this long post but trust me its worth it, what I found was mind blowing and game changing. So our business Dropbox is more than 9 million files strong, I've noticed REALISTICALLY any machine handling over 2 million will just enter an indexing loop at some point from which it will never recover, after its happened 5 times in the last week I was pissed enough to that I decided I was going to find out why this is happening, I know I'm pushing the limits but we've had machines with 2.5m files running fine for years, why some work fine and some don't was a mystery, one I was determined to find out. When you add stuff to your Dropbox, Dropbox has to index it so it can know what to do with it. If you add "too much stuff" (copying 200,000 files of small size in one go, coders know what I'm talking about) or do it "too fast" (changing access permissions on 1.5 million files located within Dropbox in one go in less than 5 minutes) on a computer with too many files (1-2+m) this causes Dropbox to start indexing them all at once causing the system to slow to a crawl however if you don't let Dropbox finish before doing something else (like adding more files or using the computer for other tasks) or someone else adds a bunch of files on another machine its almost for sure going to cause Dropbox to crash and restart during this process (it happens quite frequently), this crashing and restarting triggers a full reindexing of the ENTIRE database, ALL files, and since the machine is already trying to download or upload some of the new files while trying to reindex the current millions of files, doing both at once overtaxes it, which causes it to crash, and were back to square one with the infinite indexing crash loop. This kept happening to us all the time, the only solution was to unlink and relink the Dropbox account so all pending changes were lost, we got a bunch of conflicted copies and spent days sorting out the mess. So I figured I needed to see what was going on with Dropbox, what it was doing when it was "indexing" to find out what was causing the crashes. So after looking for a while I found using Microsoft's sysinternals process monitor (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/procmon) configured in a certain way allowed me to look at EXACTLY what dropbox was doing and I found out all I just told you and another very important piece of info. (if you want to see how awesome it looks in action check out THIS video:) When you click PAUSE FILE SYNCING you would think Dropbox pauses and ceases all operations, but you are wrong!, it pauses all incoming and outgoing transfers but any INDEXING tasks keep going! This is an absolute game changer! now if I see a machine that says "Indexing" for a long time, I turn on the process monitor, hit pause on the file syncing and watch as the machine does the indexing at super high speed (5-10 times faster than doing it while downloading), it usually finishes doing the full file reindexing in a couple of minutes once its done I can hit back resume and keep going, I've never had the app crash while doing this "offline" or "paused" indexing, thus avoiding the inevitable crash, and reindex loop. I have been successful in recovering 4 machines from the indexing loop of death using this method, where before I was screwed and had to eat the duplicate files and cleanup for a week and a TON of annoyed users in the office. Basically if your machine is taking too long indexing or is stuck indexing after a crash just hit "pause for 1 hour" and forget about it, it will still be working on the indexing in the background, and when it restarts it should have finished the re-index avoiding a crash when trying to download/upload the new files. Id wish Dropbox would have told us this, I never expected it to keep indexing while paused, I assumed pause was PAUSE, as in, cease all operations, it would have saved me so many headaches. All they need to do now is let us have a "log viewer" or something so we can tell when its done doing its thing and we can hit resume, also show us, even when in pause, when its indexing and when its not, so when its done we know we can restart it safely, or the better yet, set it to where if Dropbox has to index a large volume of files (say over 100), it will automatically pause all other disk operations until the indexing is complete, then restart the downloads, trying to do both does not work, i know you want it to but it just doesn't, and just causes the whole thing to explode non stop in a loop of death, maybe enable this on a setting somewhere? or auto enable it on machines with over 500k files? something has to be able to be done. TLDR: If your Dropbox is stuck indexing, hit pause 30 mins, and let it do its thing until its done, it will keep on doing it even when paused, you wont know if its doing anything or working unless you use procmon, but its working, and try avoid using the hard drive or the machine until its done, (usually less than 30 mins), and your indexing/crashing problem will be fixed. Message to Dropbox: Dear Dropbox, Please give us a way to view this info without having to resort to third party programs, this way we can help auto troubleshoot our Dropbox issues and take a lot of load off your customer service guys. Something like: Enabling a setting somewhere saying "activate/enable troubleshoot/server mode" or something that allows us to turn on an always shown (ALWAYS, NOT ONLY WHEN MOUSE OVER, BUT ALWAYS!!!) 3 tab little window, containing: Indexing files. (with a current list of the exact files being indexed and their speed (x files per sec)/paths) Downloading Files.(with a current list of the exact files being downloaded and their speed/paths) Uploading Files (with a current list of the exact files being uploaded and their speed/paths) There's another issue with slow uploads due to Dropbox connections stuck in a "stagnant state" (force closing the TCP socket connection using netmon restarts the download/upload and speed goes back up again) but that's another problem for another time. I hope this was helpful to some other sysadmin and sorry for the long message but it needed explaining.
Solved
XionicFire
4 years ago Place Dropbox Tips & Tricks
36KViews
16likes
12Comments
Qr code to upload photos
Maybe an idea would be to offer a qr code to upload pictures to a set drive drive. So like at a wedding the guests could scan the code and upload the photos they have took that day/evening. Then maybe within your dropbox you could team up with a photo printing company like FreePrints and get prints straight away quoit the need of downloading photos and uploading to their site Just an idea Chris
Chrisarden76
5 years ago Place Dropbox Tips & Tricks
14KViews
4likes
1Comment
How to free up space with online and offline file options
Storing and saving your files is important, and making sure your files are available where you need them can help with that. So, let’s figure out if you need to have your files available online or offline. Why should I make my Dropbox files available offline? Whatever device you’re using with Dropbox, whether it’s a computer, tablet, or phone, you can make your files and folders available offline. This is similar to downloading your files, except it also keeps them in Dropbox. This way, your files are saved offline on your device as well as online in your Dropbox account. So, whether you’re on the move, or you have wifi that drops, you can make your files available offline and keep on working. While you’re offline, changes made to your offline files won’t “sync”. This means that the changes you make offline won’t sync between your offline device and everywhere else you access your files in Dropbox. Once you are back online, Dropbox will sync the changes you made to your offline files everywhere you access them in Dropbox. How do I make files available offline? The short version of it is, within your Dropbox folder in File Explorer (Windows) or Finder (Mac), find the file you’re looking for and right-click on it, and then simply choose Make available offline. Easy! For more info, you can head over here. What are Dropbox online-only files? As the name suggests, these files are available only when you’re online. Since this frees up space on your computer or your hard drive, it is the perfect option if your laptop is at capacity, but you still want to access your files. If you set a file or folder to online-only, you’ll still see the file or folder in the Dropbox folder on your computer, but it’s just a placeholder. You can only open it if you’re connected to internet. Dropbox removes it from your computer’s hard drive, so that it only takes up space in your Dropbox account online. How to make a file or folder online-only: To set a file or folder to online-only manually: Open File Explorer (Windows) or Finder (Mac). Open the Dropbox folder. Right-click the file or folder you’d like to set to online-only. Under Quick Actions, click Make online-only. If you’d like to save your file or folder back to your computer’s hard drive, repeat this step and click Make available offline. So, now you know the difference between online-only and offline files and when each one might suit better. So, why not look at your files and folders and see if you can free up some space? Do you separate your files depending on where and when you need them?
Amy
6 years ago Place Dropbox Tips & Tricks
8.9KViews
3likes
1Comment
iPad Files app not showing Dropbox folders and how I managed to solve this.
In working with a new iPad, I discovered that the Files app was not correctly connecting with Dropbox. No Dropbox folders showed up either in the Files app or in any other app with an open feature that would normally have been able to access Dropbox files. Oddly, when I clicked “Dropbox” in the list, there were no folders but I could add a folder and that new folder showed up in Dropbox on other devices (and in the Dropbox app on the iPad)! So there was some connection but not much… This is not an issue I’m experiencing on any of my other Apple devices (Mac or iOS). In talking with Apple support they had me delete the Files app, reboot the iPad, then reinstall “Files.” I did that, but to no effect. They escalated me to a higher level of support but while I was waiting, I also deleted Dropbox and reinstalled it. That solved the problem! So, if you can’t access your Dropbox folders and files in Files or in any of your other iPad apps, just delete and reinstall Dropbox—problem solved (at least for me, this time!)
DaleC
2 years ago Place Dropbox Tips & Tricks
5.8KViews
4likes
6Comments
Dropbox Smart Sync Icons Missing on Windows 10 - SOLVED
After spending almost an entire week with Dropbox tech support, uninstalling, re-installing, cleaning registries, running command scripts, MULTIPLE TIMES... We were getting nowhere. So, I did some serious research on the web looking for ways to locate and fix Windows Right-Click "Context Menus". I found a utility called ShellExView by Nirsoft. Which pointed to another page ( fix-slow-right-click-crashes-shell-extensions ) with some more explanation on how to use it. Apparently, the problem was that, for some strange reason, as you can see in the screenshot below, the Dropbox “ContextMenuHandler Class” was marked as “Disabled”. I simply did a Right-Clickover it, and selected to “Enable selected items”. Then re-started Explorer using ShellExView's Ctrl+E option to restart the Windows shell. Please NOTE... Restarting the Explorer shell is an essential step. This should NOT be skipped. And… VOILA!!! After a few seconds... ALL of the Dropbox Context Menu items magically now appear!!! For FOLDERS, it shows like this: And for FILES, it looks like this: Hope this helps! All the best, Jacob
JacobRusso
4 years ago Place Dropbox Tips & Tricks
5.7KViews
0likes
14Comments
Tips for remote working with Dropbox
At the moment, people and teams are adjusting to the realities of a distributed workforce at a whole new scale. We want to share some tips to help make the transition as seamless as possible and ensure you stay connected and keep work moving. Get Syncing The first step in preparing yourself for remote working is to store everything you need in the cloud. That way, you and your team can access all the materials needed to keep projects moving. Sync files across all your devices and platforms. To start, sign in to your Dropbox account on each device, then add your files and folders to the Dropbox folder on your computer, phone, or tablet. The latest version of all your files and folders will be synced automatically and available on all your devices, so you won’t need to email updated versions to your team. The green checkmark lets you know all your important files are completely synced. Get offline access on all your devices. What happens if your WiFi or mobile signal drops and you can’t get online? No worries. Locally synchronized folders and files are available on the desktop app when you are offline. Once you get reconnected, Dropbox will automatically sync your folders and files with any changes you made. Upload photos and scan documents with the Dropbox mobile app With the Dropbox mobile app, you can scan documents and upload phots taken with your phone into the Dropbox folder of your choice. Dropbox Professional and Business users can even search for text within their scans, thanks to optical character recognition (OCR). Save space on your hard drive. With Dropbox, you can move files and folders to online-only, so you can work without worrying about filling up your hard drive. They’ll still be visible and accessible from your desktop, just a click away—open a file and it will automatically sync to your hard drive. Want more tips on getting the most value from Dropbox when you’re working from home? Check out How Dropbox can support distributed work.
Katie
6 years ago Place Dropbox Tips & Tricks
5.5KViews
1like
0Comments
MacOS, high CPU usage by open directory, symlinks in Dropbox
Hi, I just wanted to share how I solved this high-CPU-usage problem. The short story is: delete all your symbolic links from under the Dropbox folder. Long story: I'm on macOS High Sierra and I found that a system process ("daemon") called "opendirectoryd" keeps using 50--100% of CPU all the time as long as the computer is up. I don't know exactly when this started, but it started recently, say a few weeks. I searched the Net and found a lot of discussions about the daemon using a lot of CPU time. Apparently there are so many different causes. Some of the discussions pointed to Dropbox. I indeed found that Dropbox is the cause: when I pause syncing, the daemon's CPU use immediately drops well below 1% and as soon as I resume Dropbox syncing, the daemon's CPU use shots up and stays there forever. But all the Dropbox-related answers say that you should delete dead symbolic links. I did delete the few dead symbolic links I had in my Dropbox folder but the problem persisted. Then I came across this document in the Dropbox help: https://www.dropbox.com/help/desktop-web/high-cpu-usage which says that Dropbox uses a lot of CPU time to hand symbolic links (dead or not). Although I didn't want to do that, I bit the bullet and deleted all my symbolic links under the Dropbox folder and moved the files and folders from my main directory to Dropbox. Now, the opendirectoryd daemon stays calm.
ryofurue
8 years ago Place Dropbox Tips & Tricks
5.4KViews
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SOLUTION: Print Screen Button opens Snipping Tool (or Snip & Sketch) instead of saving to Dropbox
I initially was going to post to ask for help, but I finally got this figured out!! First of all, Dropbox has a feature to save screenshots automatically. Go to preferences and then Backup and you should find a setting to "share screenshots to dropbox". Now the problem/solution: So, I have a new Lenovo laptop running windows 10. I noticed that instead of saving screenshots to Dropbox when I press the "print screen" button on my keyboard that it would open Snip & Sketch software. I tried uninstalling that software and now it just opens Snipping Tool instead. For the life of me I couldn't figure out how to simply save a screenshot into Dropbox . I tried restarting, reinstalling. I tried all the different variations of taking a screenshot, such as Windows Key + PrtSc etc etc. I tried removing Snipping Tool with registry edit but couldn't find it. I turned off the setting “Print Screen Shortcut” in the “Easy of Access Keyboard” settings which SHOULD have done the trick but did NOT. It even says I need to restart which I did, and it still didn't work. Then I read online you can take screenshots with WINDOWS KEY + VOLUME DOWN And I got the beautiful notification "A SCREENSHOT WAS ADDED TO DROPBOX" WOOHOO! Problem Solved!! For some reason, that command now behaves like the old print screen button used to. (You might need to also find your “ease of access keyboard settings” and turn off the setting “Print Screen Shortcut” which I did prior to discovering this awkward solution, so if this didn’t work for you, try turning that setting off and trying again) I hope this helps someone out there. It took me 2 hours to figure this out.
urbanform
6 years ago Place Dropbox Tips & Tricks
5.1KViews
4likes
3Comments
What you need to know about storing and backing up your photos with Dropbox
We see a lot of questions about storing, sharing and backing up your photos on Dropbox so here are some tips to make that as easy as possible! Back up photos automatically to your Dropbox account You know we love an automatic process, so whether it’s your camera roll photos, your screenshots or your document scans, your cloud photos are some of the most important files you have. In fact our own Emmet told us about a time when he almost lost his photos due to a tech malfunction - “One of my old hard drives of photos got corrupted several years ago. This was almost a year of photos. Thankfully, lot of these had been saved to my Dropbox account automatically, and this was important as a couple who I was friends with wanted a high definition photo of them from the first night they went out together, and I was only able to share it on their wedding day because it was saved on Dropbox.“ Keeping full-resolution copies backed up with online photo storage means you can access them anytime, and you know there is a safe and secure copy in the cloud. Here are just a few ways Dropbox can keep your photos safe: Camera uploads: Once you turn this on, photos from your phone or tablet will be automatically backed up to Dropbox. Or in our desktop app, photos will be copied from cameras, memory cards, or mobile devices whenever you connect one to your computer. Screenshot backups: You can set up our desktop app to automatically move screenshot images to your Dropbox, or have mobile device screenshots backed up using camera uploads. Document scanning: The native/built-in scan functionality in the Dropbox mobile app lets you use your phone’s camera to scan and make digital backups of receipts, whiteboards, and paper documents. Share your photos with links, shared folders and control access Storing your photos is great, but chances are you will want to share some - whether it’s with family members, teammates or the expense team at work. There are a few ways you can do that, and you can manage the access with a few clicks as well. Shared links: You can easily create a link to share any file or folder in your Dropbox. Copy and paste your link into an email, text message, or chat, to share with anyone—even if they don’t have a Dropbox account. Access control: Keep your photos in the right hands by adding password protection, expiration dates, and sign-in requirements to your shared links. Shared folders: Want to collect your photos and someone else’s in the same place? Share files back and forth by inviting other people to sync a folder between your account and theirs. Organize your photos: Saving and sharing your photos can be great but it’s no use if you can’t find the one your looking for, so organizing and viewing your photos is essential too! Here are some tips on how to do that, and if that’s not enough you can see how our own Eliene organizes her photos. Photo browsing: View and browse all of your photos and videos from the Photos tab in our mobile app or on the web. Image previews: View over 35 image file types from dropbox.com or our mobile app. You can preview common files like JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and GIF; app-specific types like Photoshop and Illustrator; raw formats like CR2, DCR, and DNG; and even iOS HEIC photos. Best of all, there’s no need for special photo software. Image tagging: Find your photos fast by adding searchable hashtags to individual photos or an entire folder. How do you manage your photos with Dropbox? Share your tips in the comments below, or if you have any questions you, we can answer those too!
Amy
4 years ago Place Dropbox Tips & Tricks
4.7KViews
1like
2Comments
Massive Data Upload and Sync Process - 20TB
Hi everyone, I am writing here to explain the process of our most recent data upload of 20TB to Dropbox via a 2019 Mac Pro connected to a 10Gbps Fiber line. The goal is to help those understand some of the issues we experienced as well as setting expectations to those who plan on uploading massive amounts of data at once. Below are the steps: Procure a 10Gb fiber PCIe card for the 2019 Mac Pro - Solo10G SFP+ 10GbE PCIe Card with SFP+ Module - after working closely with our Apple business rep, we found the this card which would work for our requirements. Yes, the 2019 Mac Pro has 10Gb ethernet ports, but we only had Fiber lines in our setup, not Ethernet. Not to mention adapters usually have 1Gb limits so this was not an acceptable solution either. We wanted to experience max speeds so we opted for a dedicated 10GbE fiber card. Speed Tests - we conducted speed tests after card installation and confirmed the speeds were around 4.5Gbps to 5Gbps upload and download. We could not figure out if the 50% falloff was on the 2019 Mac Pro side or on the ISP side. Still however, 5Gbps is no joke so we continued onward. (PS: We could not conduct speed tests via the Speedtest.net when on 4GB+ fiber. We had to download software to the PC/Mac to get true internet speeds.) Upload - We already had 20TB on the Dropbox Folder moved and was paused & ready to sync. We simply turned the computer on, ensured it had a good connection, and then turned Sync on via the Dropbox for Mac application. Thats it. The data automatically began to upload just as it would any other sync. Realized Speeds - Even with the 4.5 to 5Gbps up|down speeds, we only saw between 600Mbps to 900Mbps being uploaded to the Dropbox cloud. We hoped to see at least 2Gbps or 3Gbps being sent to Dropbox but this was not the case unfortunately. Still however, the ~750Mbps speed was enough to upload the 20TB in about three days which we were ok with. Note: At the beginning of the sync, the speeds were extremely slow which we contributed to the initial file indexing. About 3 hours in to the main sync is when the speeds started to get to their highest levels. Also, we checked our ISP speeds twice per day and at its LOWEST point we saw internet speeds of 3.5Gbps. Online-Only (Spoiler Warning - massive bottleneck!) - After about 70 hours of upload time, the full 20TB was on the cloud. Our Dropbox account confirmed the newly uploaded data storage amount. Our next step was to get this 20TB off of our 2019 Mac Pro external RAID (Pegasus R4i). Again, the process was just like any other file(s). We simply highlighted thew newly uploaded files and right-clicked, then selected "Make online-only". Simple right? Yeah, not so much. This is where we noticed lots of issues with our system. Essentially this 20TB "indexing?" caused us to essentially have to run Dropbox completely via the browser. There was no possibility of doing other things like downloading files via the Dropbox Mac application or Double clicking and a small JPEG opening up. The application simply said, "NO" and only had one task in mind, get these 20TB worth of files OFF of this hard drive. The good news? It did so, only taking a whopping 500 hours to remove these files off of the drive. A few notes: We were able to pause syncing during the "file-removal" / online-only process), restart the computer, resume syncing all without any error messages which was very impressive. I expected the application to crash, hang up, etc. Not at all. Note: We did NOT pause syncing during the main 20TB upload. Why did it take so long? I am not a software engineer but clearly it did not enjoy this task and it could be due to a number of reasons. Maybe simply the application was not built to handle 20TB? Maybe our computer did not have the power? Maybe it was due to the main Dropbox drive being on a RAID array? Who knows. Thats about all I wanted to say here. Again, the purpose of this small write up is to show how the software/cloud performed under extreme tasking. I would say overall very well considering. Hopefully this helps someone out there who's considering uploading massive amounts of data at once. TLDR: Uploading massive amounts of data via fiber internet = quick and easy. Removing this data off the drive / Making files "Online-only" = very time-consuming and not for the faint of heart. 2019 Mac Pro specs:
ehcropydoc
3 years ago Place Dropbox Tips & Tricks
4.4KViews
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3Comments