Child Item

Files not syncing on a Dropbox folder on a server

Hello all,

Two or three weaks ago dropbox decided to remove symlinks, and we have to move all our files to a new 4TB disk that is mounted on our main server (Ubuntu System). We follow the protocol and now we have a 4TB EXT4 directory as main folder for our Dropbox.

We are a company that have 2 accounts, some folders and important information are syncing between each other, as we use that as our main shares for the company. Since the new disk was adquired all the structure folders are doing conflicts over and over, and when i create some files or folders it always syncing between the Dropbox site, but the information does not arrives on the machine, and one of the machine dropbox is always saying "Downloading at 0,0kb/s), and its stuck.

I already tried several approaches but its very boring, cause people are constatly working on these folders, and its over 500,000 files. Its actually the double of that. I have no more ideas what i can do to fix this problem, but after several approaches i can only think its a Dropbox problem.

What i already tried:

- Remove and purge Dropbox and let it sync again but the problem persists;

- Remove and purge databases instances and let it sync again but the problem persists;

Hoping some kind of answer since i already read the help section, and none of the suggested solutions seems to work.

Thanks in advance.

Find more posts tagged with

Desktop

Sync

Insightful

Closed - Partially Delivered

Accepted answers

Mecalbi

Hello again,

Thank you all for your answers.

It seems i needed to increase my 'inotify.max_user_watches'. It syncing very slow, but its syncing. We will adopt measures to reduce the number of files in our Dropbox folders, since this is not advicable and it even can crash our system.

I will marked this as solved for now. Thank you all again for the support.

All comments

Jay

Hi @Mecalbi, thanks for posting!

To try to get to the bottom of this, let's first discuss the number of files.

As you mentioned you have over 500k files (perhaps double), this could indicate an issue since if there are more than 300,000 files syncing, the Dropbox desktop application performance decreases.

It also depends on how people are accessing the files on the server. Are you remotely logging into the server to add and work on files, or are folders shared to individual accounts from there?

Are you instead sharing the entire Dropbox folder over your network?

Any info you can provide on how the company syncs files to the server would help me greatly!

Mecalbi

Hello,

Thanks for the answer. Yes, we are using our dropbox folders into network shares. That can be a problem? There´s any workaround? Thanks.

Mecalbi

[Forget to mention] ... We are using Samba File Sharing to create our shares into the network. Each person has a user, but all files are being forced to stay with 0777 permissions and with 'user' owner, same user where Dropbox service / application is running. Then we create symbolic links outside the dropbox folder pointing to the original location of Dropbox, and use the same symbolic links on the samba shares path. Still, we do not use symbolic links inside Dropbox Folder.

Cheers.

Jay

Yes, that would be an issue, since network file systems do not send messages when files change, meaning the Dropbox app won’t know that it needs to sync anything yet.

There isn’t any workaround for this, as it’s to do with the whole structure of the way networks share and transfer files.

You’d need to either have users remotely login to the one account on the server, which isn’t recommended since it can result in conflicted copies, or have multiple Dropbox accounts with shared folders to the server account.

Symlinks into the Dropbox folder likewise would fail since the computers are sharing it over the network.

However, given the apparent size of the account, they’d need more than that 2 GB of quota given with free accounts, so either paid personal or Business accounts would be better placed for your needs.

Mecalbi

Also its happening with the larger files. They are never synced with my machine.

Jay

What does the Dropbox desktop application show on your computer? Is the status showing as up-to-date, or syncing?

Mecalbi

[amended as per Community Guidelines]

Mecalbi

Its stucking on that.. I checked if i delete the file from Dropbox site the folder stays synced. I can see its happening on files that have + than 30MB.

Jay

It’s possible that the issue is related to the number of files you have on your account. Is this again when remotely logging into the machine, or is this the account physically located on your local computer?

Mecalbi

Probably is the number of files. But was not happening before when we used the symbolic links inside Dropbox. Didn´t understand quite your question. Can you explain please?

Jay

Sorry, my question was, is this on your personal machine, as in, the files are not syncing to your computer?

This isn’t the remote login to the server we’re referring to, the one with the issues?

Mecalbi

This is happening on our Server (Ubuntu). The files all are on Dropbox Website. The bsecond account that have the shared files its working good on Dropbox Website too. They just not are going to the server.

Server_Align

@Jay wrote:
Yes, that would be an issue, since network file systems do not send messages when files change, meaning the Dropbox app won’t know that it needs to sync anything yet.
There isn’t any workaround for this, as it’s to do with the whole structure of the way networks share and transfer files.
You’d need to either have users remotely login to the one account on the server, which isn’t recommended since it can result in conflicted copies, or have multiple Dropbox accounts with shared folders to the server account.
Symlinks into the Dropbox folder likewise would fail since the computers are sharing it over the network.
However, given the apparent size of the account, they’d need more than that 2 GB of quota given with free accounts, so either paid personal or Business accounts would be better placed for your needs.

Having the Dropbox application on the Server is fine, the File Change Notification will go off when any network user changes a file via the shares, the FCN goes off for the truepath and the servers dropbox application is watchig the truepath.

The cause of his non stop syncing is the updated app has faults in the reindex routine.

I suggest he does the following.

Unlink the app, rename the dropbox folder dropOLD, relink the dropbox app, using cloud only files, sync them all up, they take near no space so will fit on the drive next to the real files in DropOLD, once synced, turn off the application, and move the content of the dropOLD folder into the created Dropbox folder, restart the app. DB will see all the moved in files as changed, then check the content is the same as the index keys find they are the same and come up to sync.

*** I have just last week completed this, on our 750k file set ***

Warning : Suggest you isolate all 4TB+ files and delay adding them untill all other files are reindex and sync is completed again, then only move 3 at a time in. The app appears to also have a fault when it is reindexing 4 >4TB files at once causing a endless syncing loop.

Mecalbi

Hello again,

Thank you all for your answers.

I will marked this as solved for now. Thank you all again for the support.

pjiggy

Ran into this problem a few times that I've written down the best solution (cause it comes up with each new computer).

Open a terminal and type the following

echo fs.inotify.max_user_watches=524288 | sudo tee /etc/sysctl.d/40-max-user-watches.conf && sudo sysctl --system

This works with up to 500K files.

I still need to use selective sync, but it runs really well

To find the error which explains the, just run dropbox in your terminal and read the output.

Hope this helps.