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Dropbox is indexing more files than I have in my Dropbox

Mac OS X 10.14.6

The dropbox app tells me that it's synchronizing over 6 million files and uploading more than 400,000. But according to a terminal 'find' listing, I only have 592988 files in my Dropbox folder. It then gets stuck at synchronizing, and the count of files to be synchronized and uploaded never changes.

I have tried repairing permissions within the Dropbox app, fixing hardlinks, doing an advanced re-install, and I have made sure that I don't have any symbolic links inside my Dropbox folder either. None of this works.

I suspect it has something to do with the account or files because this problem occurs on both my computers - Laptop and iMac. I'm on a very fast university internet connection and the iMac is the most high-powered 2018 model so I don't think it's a computing resource issue.

Any ideas?

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Mark M.122

OK so here is what solved the problem:

Unlink the Dropbox. Make a backup of all the files in the local Dropbox.

Delete everything in the Dropbox online through the web interface except for the online-only folders.

Link the Dropbox again and let it upload everything. Works fine again with over 800,000 files. Must have been a problem online then. This is obviously really onerous but it worked.

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Daphne

Hey @Mark M.122, I hope you're having a good day so far!

It could be due to the number of files that you're trying to sync, as the performance of the desktop app can sometime start to degrade after 300,000 files.

While this does highly depend in the OS and hardware specifications, I'd suggest trying to use selective sync to try and reduce the initial syncing load on the desktop app.

In this case, you can try unlinking the desktop app so that you can apply the selective sync settings from the "Advanced settings" while setting up the app before it syncs.

If the files have been moved to the Dropbox folder to be uploaded and haven't yet been synced to your account, then you can move these back out of the Dropbox folder to see if the sync progresses before adding them back.

Since you've tried quite a few steps already, can you please try the above?

Let me know how it goes!

Mark M.122

Thanks Daphne, that's always the standard answer to any synchronization problem but I have sync'ed 800k+ files with this configuration without any issues before.

I don't know which files supposedly cause the problem. I don't have over 6 million files in my Dropbox.

Mark M.122

OK so here is what solved the problem:

Unlink the Dropbox. Make a backup of all the files in the local Dropbox.

Delete everything in the Dropbox online through the web interface except for the online-only folders.

Link the Dropbox again and let it upload everything. Works fine again with over 800,000 files. Must have been a problem online then. This is obviously really onerous but it worked.

Daphne

Hey @Mark M.122, apologies for the delayed reply here!

I'm very glad to hear that you resolved the issue, awesome work on the troubleshooting there too.

I really appreciate you taking the time to come back and share what worked for you here, as I'm sure that this will be helpful to others who might be having the same issue.

If you do happen to have any other questions or issues, please don't hesitate to give me a nudge here and I'd be more than happy to help out.

I hope you have a great day!

robromijnders

For other unix people, here's the command to echo the top 5 directories with most files in them. Helps to see where all the files are, like logging directories or npm libraries

$ find . -maxdepth 1 -type d -exec bash -c 'echo -n "{}: "; find {} -type f | wc -l' \; | sort -nrk2 | head -n 5