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For the past six months I have had Dropbox on two Windows 10 PCs with many files regularly being created/modified and synced within the Dropbox folders of both of them. But for the past two weeks they will both work fine for many hours and then one or other (or both) will come up against a blocked sync process, i.e. Dropbox will report "Syncing N files" and that value of 'N' will never change however long I leave it. If I click "View sync issues" it just reports "No errors". The problem will go away, at least temporarily, if I close Dropbox down and restart it again.

I have spent hours with Dropbox support and they have suggested a great many things to try but it feels very much like they're just guessing. So my question is not so much "what could cause this problem" - I already have a distressingly long list. Instead my question is - could the use of some utility like Process Explorer or some such, to actually diagnose the problem without all the guesswork?

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  • Process Explorer won't help, except (perhaps) for a very advanced user. Questions: What do you see in the Sync Queue when this happens? Have you tried to clear out the Dropbox cache by going to the hidden .dropbox.cache folder within your Dropbox folder and deleting the files it contains then restarting Dropbox?
    – harrymc
    Commented Jan 25, 2021 at 9:02
  • @harrymc: Thank you for the suggestion - and I may well try it - but the problem with trying things like that is that after a restart it will always work again and it may take up to 24hours so before I notice it blocking again... so if I have a list of 20 things to try then it could take 20 days to go through all the trials. That's why I phrased the question in the way I did. Maybe there is no reasonable way to diagnose this problem and I will accept that if it's really the case.
    – Mick
    Commented Jan 25, 2021 at 10:47

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As Dropbox Support was unable to suggest a solution, this sounds like a bug.

Using Process Explorer and its sibling Process Monitor can only show what is happening, but cannot explain why something is not happening.

This problem of sync has been raised many times over the years and there have been many propositions offered, but no solutions for preventing this from happening in the first place.

I have listed one proposition which was to clean out the hidden .dropbox.cache folder within your Dropbox folder and restarting Dropbox, to which you answered that restarting Dropbox by itself would solve the problem.

Unfortunately, any real solution to this long-running problem must come from Dropbox. It is not within our power to fix its code. The most you can do is to file a bug-report, or to join your voice to an existing one(s). In the meantime, while waiting for a solution from Dropbox (if it will ever arrive), you have the workaround of restarting Dropbox, or equally of restarting the computer.

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  • That is really annoying for software like that to have still such bugs. Especially from such a big company that provides world-wide used software.
    – pbies
    Commented Jan 27, 2021 at 17:57
  • @pbies: The size of the company doesn't ensure good code quality. Many times, just the opposite.
    – harrymc
    Commented Jan 27, 2021 at 18:12

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