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Gray X on files, and they won't open. What does this mean? Should I change their settings?

Hi,

I have thousands of gray Xs on my dropbox files and they will not open. When I click on the file I get an adobe notification that says "somethings gone wrong" or if it is Words, it simply freezes the program from opening. I noticied that when this happens my dropbox in the systray starts to "sync." This is causing a tremendous delay in reaching information. I went to online only with smart sync. Do I need to go back in and make everything local, then do my on selective online only? I moved a tremendous amount of data that I access often but not consistantly. Was there a builtin upload of files that automatically made anything last modified not accessible?

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GreyWolfSweden

In case you are absolutely sure that a particular file is LOCAL, and not involved in any syncing scheme (DropBox or OneDrive), you can reset the grey X icon flag in Windows CMD with the command ATTRIB -O <myfile>

Do a CD to the folder with the problematic file and perform: attrib -O "my problem file.txt" on that file.

In my case, the X flags appeared after reverting from the DropBox Backup scheme for Desktop back to the pristine LOCAL

file status, which apparently did not succeed: Most of the icons in my Desktop were tagged with the grey X after disabling the backup sync. With DIR/B > repair.bat in CMD you can edit the the file repair.bat to contain the attrib -O command for each row and then execute the repair.bat script. Make sure to put double quotes "..." around file names with blanks or strange characters. Only do this if you are absolutely sure that the files are NOT involved in a syncing scheme (DropBox, OneDrive, or other).

Example of such a repair.bat:

attrib -O "AAA_README.doc"
attrib -O "Acid-Jazz-playlist-55-pieces.txt"
attrib -O "Project-555.txt"
attrib -O "PhDs.txt"
attrib -O "Winehouse.docx"

The grey X flags on the icons will disappear within seconds.

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Jay

Hi @L B., thanks for providing these details!

It sounds like you might have another cloud service running on your machine, which is causing the grey X icon to appear. This old thread has more details on this behavior.

The icons could also be for files marked as online-only, could you try marking them as local to see if this helps, especially with opening the files on Adobe or Word?

This will help me to assist further!

L B.

What I'm currently doing is syncing 100% back to local (argh). We will see what will happen... saying 2 days to sync and I switched from wifi to wired connection

jows_yang

I just had the same problem. The solution for me was to uninstall OneDrive. Then Task Manager >> Windows Explorer restart. No more gray "X" and back to the normal dropbox file icons. Hope this helps.

GreyWolfSweden

Do a CD to the folder with the problematic file and perform: attrib -O "my problem file.txt" on that file.

In my case, the X flags appeared after reverting from the DropBox Backup scheme for Desktop back to the pristine LOCAL

Example of such a repair.bat:

attrib -O "AAA_README.doc"
attrib -O "Acid-Jazz-playlist-55-pieces.txt"
attrib -O "Project-555.txt"
attrib -O "PhDs.txt"
attrib -O "Winehouse.docx"

The grey X flags on the icons will disappear within seconds.

MrCartaaaa

Thank you,

This worked for me.