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Dropbox stuck on sync or index

hi all,
my dropbox in my all computers just stop syncing or stuck on indexing a few days ago.

i notice that if i use old version (114.4.426) of the app everything is back to normal but the app keep updateing by her self.

this is a bug that have to be fix ASAP.

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Emma

Hi @idanfo,

Thank you for reporting this, it is related to a known issue a number of users experienced last week. The team have now resolved this and it should be working again.

Please let us know if we can help with anything else or you're still having trouble!

All comments

Daphne

Hi there @idanfo, I hope you're well today!

Just to confirm, which version of the app is causing this syncing issue? Are you possibly using a beta version denoted xx.3.xxx?

Please also let me know which OS and version you're computer is running, so that I can suggest accurate troubleshooting steps.

Keep me posted - thanks!

idanfo

The app version with the problem is 115.3.529.
I have this problem on windows 10 and windows 7

Emma

Hi @idanfo,

Thank you for reporting this, it is related to a known issue a number of users experienced last week. The team have now resolved this and it should be working again.

Please let us know if we can help with anything else or you're still having trouble!

Andrew S.2

Emma, I am experiencing the same issue. I am using the Windows 10 version number 115.4.601. Two issues:

1. I have enabled the checkbox to start Dropbox app upon Windows start, but it does not launch.

2. If I make changes to files in synced folders offline (locally) then launch Dropbox app, only some of the changed files will sync, then all of a sudden, it just stops syncing, and says "Syncing 47 files" without ever resolving.

Am I using the latest version? Do you have any ideas why this is happening? It is a new issue.

Thank you.

Walter

Hey there @Andrew S.2; I'm sorry to jump in here, but did you install the desktop app with admin privileges on your computer in the first place?

If you did and syncing still gets stuck, you can try fixing your hardlinks and permissions as well.

Maybe that will do the trick!

PS: The version of the app you're using at the moment is indeed the latest, stable one.

Andrew S.2

Thanks Walter. Yes indeed I installed it under my own account, which has admin privileges. However these 47 files, wherever they are do not ever resolve. It continuously says "syncing 47 files". Reinstalling did not fix the issue.

Walter

Thanks for the update on this, Andrew.

If you're still having this issue, could you try fixing your hardlinks and permissions as I mentioned earlier?

In case syncing gets stuck again, I'd appreciate a screenshot of the app's exact status as shown in your system tray.

jl232221

Hi,

I am experiencing this (or a similar) issue. Two win 1020h2 pcs experiencing issues since yesterday (didn't notice it before). Version 115.4.601 in both.

One of them is perpertually 'Downloading 117 files' though it has uploaded some new files (I see them online), but it is not downloading files changed yesterday.

The other seems up to date, but it is not downloading changes uploaded successfully from the first one.

I don't see any option to 'Fix Hardlinks' or anything similar in my Preferences/Account.

thanks for looking into this, it's really making using PCs really hard

Andrew S.2

I should mention that I've been a Dropbox Plus customer for years, and all these problems with syncing are new since you introduced SmartSync. I wish you would remove that feature altogether.

Walter

Hey there @jl232221 & @Andrew S.2; thanks for your nudges on this.

If you're still having issues with this, may I reach out via email to have a better look?

Andrew S.2

Hello @Walter -

Yes please. However I have some more insight into the issue.

The article on your kb that you're pointing to is out-of-date, it does not match the current app UI.
I have found the 47 files that are causing the issue by clicking View sync issues from the system tray icon
I am still unable to have both the online and local copy of one of my folders synced between DB and my computer, so this causes SmartSync to kick in every time I click on the files (not all of them, though). This folder has 20,000+ files, and I have plenty of h/d space so that's not the issue. It seems like since you introduced SmartSync, you can only have one or the other, not both locations. Perhaps I'm not understanding how it works, though.

Please feel free to reach out to me. This is an ongoing saga that I've been working on with other people at DB support. I don't want to move to OneDrive or Google but DB has become too cumbersome and kludgy and unreliable.

Look forward to hearing from you when you have a chance.

Andrew

tullio0106

Same problem with 115.4.601.

I've 1225 files allways indexing.

I use Dropbox as backup but it hangs indexing a variable number of files and it dosn't complete the operation.

At that moment I don't know if my files are synched or not.

Very bad problem.

Tks

Andrew S.2

@tullio0106If you click on the Db icon in your system tray, then on your profile image and click View sync issues, do you see the 1225 files in that list?

Andrew S.2

@WalterOne other issue on that same PC is that I've enabled the checkbox to start Db when Windows starts, but it doesn't start. I have to manually go to the Start Menu and click on it from there. This is not an issue on my other PC.

tullio0106

I'm quite new, what do You mean with DB icon ?

The number of files is not the same every time.

It was 1225 when I wrote the message, now it's sayng Indexing 4 files and syncing 1820 files.

Tks

Walter

Thanks for all the additional information here @Andrew S.2; I've just sent you a ticket so that we can have a further look into this.

Please take a look at your inbox and we'll take it from there.

As per your concern now @tullio0106, could you send us a screenshot of the app's exact status as shown in your menu bar/system tray?

Thanks so much!

VibDAS DSI

I hope it is OK that I jump in on this thread, I new to this forum, so let me know if I should post somewhere else, but I have also been fighting this problem for a few weeks now.

Here all the details I can think of.

Machine Windows Server 2016 (basically the "Windows 10" server), version 1607, OS Build 14393.4169 latest patches)

Dropbox version 115.5.601

Dropbox account is a business account.

Dropbox installed using administrator account.

Dropbox folder has 145,588 files and they take up 24.8 GB, these are mostly relatively small text files spread out over lots of sub folders.

On average only about 150 files are added in an hour. Customers drop in their files to be processed. the processing is done in non Dropbox folders, and once copied out, they are moved to a sub folder in Dropbox.

The sync locks up about once a day. It is usually saying it is syncing a small amount of files like 2 or 3, but the amount changes from lockup to lockup. Here is a screenshot of it both with the dialog open and hovering over the Dropbox icon.

Once it is locked up like this the only thing I can do is kill it with the Windows task manager.

If I select "pause" the "pause" never completes.

EDIT: I also selected the menu for showing sync errors, and it reports none.

If I then restart it, it again works for about another day before it lock up again.

Note that when the sync is locked up the icons on the files/folders in the Dropbox folder/sub folders to no have the Dropbox icon, just the standard windows ones, and the recent files what were being processed are locked (Windows lock).

Troubleshooting tried:

Reboot machine
Uninstall/reinstall
Ran the "hard link" permission function.
Tried both with smart sync on and with it off and only local files.

This is really quite critical for the company I'm working for because the model has been setup with the customers to just drop their files in their shared Dropbox folders and the server processes their files. And Dropbox is used by the business too for internal use.

To change to another method for the customers to send their files will be "painful".

Thank you for any help you can provide.

Chris

Walter

Hi @VibDAS DSI; thanks for joining the discussion here and sorry to hear you're having issues with this.

As you've already done some troubleshooting on this, may I reach out via email to investigate this further?

VibDAS DSI

Sorry just seeing this now. Yes emailing me is fine.

Walter

Thanks for that, Chris. You've got :envelope:

LukeL_MMS

Re: Issue posted by VibDAS DSI

We've been having this exact same issue at our company since December 18-21 of last year. We've been in touch with Dropbox support since the first week of January, and have not been able to solve the problem either.

We're also in a position where we have several machines (in different geographic locations) that are taking in files via Dropbox, processing them, then placing the results back into another Dropbox folder, and in crunch time we have to monitor the machines almost 24*7 to make sure they're still syncing. Sometimes one of our machines will go several days without needing to restart Dropbox, other times we'll have to restart Dropbox multiple times in a single day. It seems to happen more often during high-bandwidth situations.

Just before the issue started we had reinstalled Windows 2016 Server on our server - which requires a reinstallation of Dropbox on that machine. Within a few days the issues started on most everyone's machine. That timing has been particularly odd & keeps bugging at me, as we had been using this workflow almost seamlessly for over a year - but I never thought until now that something related to Windows Server 2016 itself might be causing the issue - as this is the only Server machine we have.

I don't think we technically need to have Dropbox on our Server (though it would be nice), so I'm thinking of uninstalling DB from it to see if that fixes anything.

VibDAS DSI

If you do, and it fixes the problem, please post back here.

I'm in the situation right now that our applications have to be run on this server, so our options might be very limited if that turns out to be the problem.

Thank you, Sincerely,

Chris

LukeL_MMS

Definitely. Would appreciate learning anything you discover as well. Thanks!

VibDAS DSI

Absolutely. Walter is working with me and so I/we will certainly let you know if we find anything.

VibDAS DSI

I'm going to post this here to hopefully benefit all.

You stated "It seems to happen more often during high-bandwidth situations. "

And that reminded me that there was one other "troubleshooting" thing that I did very early on when this first started.

To test our system, and Dropbox. I had a process that submits one file to be processed every 15 minutes. When a file is processed it sends out email. And that same process checks the emails and if there isn't any for 30 minutes it sends an email to let us know things are down. When this started happening I switched that process to submit the file to be processed in another folder not in Dropbox. This did help because it was locking up more frequently, like you said sometimes multiple times a day. Now without that process it only locks up about once a day. Of course now Dropbox syncing isn't being tested in the flow. I have to monitor that manually now.

So high-bandwidth might not be the answer as much as "frequency". Even though 1 file every 15 minutes is hardly "frequent".

LukeL_MMS

By high-bandwidth I was specifically referring to quantity of MB, but for the most part its 1 to 1, as our high frequency moments are often high bandwidth - but there are certain times that larger files than normal are being shared, which almost always causes the issue on one of the machines.

But it doesn't occur on all the machines at the same time - even though they're all syncing the same files ; one machine will stop syncing at time X, and then multiple hours later another machine stop syncing.

VibDAS DSI

Wow, very strange. Especially if the server can somehow affect what the other machines are doing, doesn't really seem likely, but who knows?

What this all "feels like" to me is Dropbox is waiting on some locked file, and gets hung up on it.

Even though there isn't a lot of interaction between the program processing the file and Dropbox there is certainly reading the directory about 1 once a minute and if files are in there it checks their modification times to wait for them to be "stable" (two minutes without change) and then copies them out and moves them to a sub directory in Dropbox.

LukeL_MMS

Agreed on the hung-up-on-a-file aspect, but the tricky part is which one?

The DB tech support staff pointed out a couple files that they noticed were causing issues in ours logs; one of which was definitely problematic, and while its removal did fix one sync issue that we had been experiencing, it didn't fix this specific larger issue. The other files were seemingly quite random, innocuous files that had just been generated.

I'd love to be able to pick through the sync logs myself to see if I can identify any patterns in particular that coincide with any internal/company workflows - i,e, are their certain file types that struggle more than others, certain workstations/users, that sort of thing - but at the moment as users we don't have access to our own sync logs.

I've emailed the staff to see if they can send us copies of the logs for one particular machine that experienced the issue on two specific days; hopefully that will help us track down the issue.

VibDAS DSI

Are you still getting this problem?

About 3 days ago Dropbox updated to 116.4.368, and so far our Dropbox hasn't hung up on the sync.

I even changed back to the system where I put in a file to be processed every 15 minutes, which caused it to hang up more often, and so far (one day) it has hung up.

Note that Walter did get back to me and tell me since the server operating system isn't supported they couldn't look into it further.

Hopefully you/we get lucky.

LukeL_MMS

Not sure; over the past couple months we went through a week or so where the issue didn't occur because we weren't stressing the system; if we can go several weeks without it happening, or proceed through a few high bandwith timeframes where it doesn't occur, then I'll be able to more confidently say it's fixed.

That said - yesterday we discovered another potential cause of the issue - a (very) hidden system file that Windows 10 generates inside our Dropbox due to the fact that we're mounting one of our Dropbox folders as a system drive letter. The file ("System Volume Information") has several layers of heavy permissions protections, so DB tries to sync it but can't - and that might be causing the hangups. If we bypass the permissions and delete the file, Windows will eventually replace it. If we bypass the permissions and let it sync, then we get some 'Conflicted Copy' bugs.

At the moment the file is deleted on those machines... so if we have success in the short run, it might be because of that, or it might be because of the Dropbox update... only time will tell.