"The file has been changed by another application."

David W.136

Over the past couple of weeks, both of my Macs have been telling me that files cannot be autosaved because "The file has been changed by another application." 

 

• This occurs in multiple applications, including Keynote, Preview, Multimarkdown Composer, and more. 
• The error message says that it has failed when trying to autosave
• It lets me revert or "save anyway." The latter seems to work properly, although because this is supposed to be an autosave, I can get the popup every few minutes.
• I am running MacOS 10.13.4
• It seems not to happen when I pause Dropbox syncing
• I am getting the same problem on two Mac laptops
• I have rebooted
• I have looked in the logs to see if in fact some other app is altering my files, but I don't see anything suspicious there. OTOH, I'm no expert.
• I have looked in Activity Monitor for suspicious processes but don't see any obvious suspects.
• Malwarebytes doesn't find any viruses on either machine

Any ideas? Thanks!

 

Norah

 

Hi @David W.136, thanks for checking in with us!

 

To help isolate this issue, try quitting the Dropbox app by using the following steps:

 

• Click the Dropbox icon in your system tray (Windows) or menu bar (Mac/Linux)
• Click on the gear icon in the Notifications panel and select "Quit Dropbox"

 

If the issue persists when Dropbox is completely closed, this suggests that the cause is related to something outside of the Dropbox application. You may want to check other applications or components of your Operating System that could be causing this.

 

Let me know if the issue is resolved when Dropbox is completely closed!