Child Item

What is this 'cloud only' icon?

I have a file in my Dropbox folder on my Mac that has a "cloud only" icon next to it (see screenshot). What does it mean? It's not one of the icons mentioned at https://help.dropbox.com/sync/macos-sync-icons. Right-clicking the file does not give any of the standard Dropbox-related options (Share, Send a Copy, Copy Dropbox Link, etc.).

I'm running version v168.4.4802 and Ventura 13.2.1 on an M1 Air.

Screenshot_2023-03-06 07.50.30_Tiqd38.png

Find more posts tagged with

Desktop

Mac

GUI

Insightful

Accepted answers

All comments

Jay

Hi @bri_guy, thanks for bringing this to our attention.

Could you attach a screenshot showing the context menu options you get when right clicking the file?

This will help me to assist further!

bri_guy

Screenshot_2023-03-06 09.06.56_lysddL.png

Jay

Is this file synced fully, and is it visible on the Dropbox site? Do you have any other files in the same folder with the missing context menu item?

bri_guy

1) The file DOES appear on dropbox.com but is not syncing. Any changes made to the file locally are no longer being synced with the online version.

2) I do have one other file with the same icon/missing context menu. Both files with this issue have the .rw8 extension. These are project files created by RapidWeaver. Note that I have other .rw8 files that are not experiencing this issue.

Megan

Hi @bri_guy, let's try something else:

Can you please make sure you re-start both the device, and sign out and then back into the app?

Just make sure that the files are closed when you do, and they're not open in any other program too.

bri_guy

Well, after following your suggestions I have a bigger problem and it really looks like the Dropbox app is at fault. Here's what's happened:

After restarting my Mac, I logged out of the Dropbox app. Automatically, a pop-up appeared asking me to sign back in, which I did. For whatever reason, the app created a folder at ~/myusername/Dropbox (this folder is currently syncing). This USED to be the location for Dropbox documents before MacOS forced the move to using ~/username/Library/CloudStorage.

Now, the folder at ~/username/Library/CloudStorage/Dropbox has had today's date appended to its name and Finder says "This is an unlinked Dropbox". How can I fix this mess? Why is the Dropbox app using the OLD location for Dropbox documents?

Screenshot_2023-03-07 07.34.53_OGL79Z.png Screenshot_2023-03-07 07.36.06_dQxHbD.png

Hannah

Hey @bri_guy, sorry to jump in here.

Logging out of the Dropbox app and then back in, caused the folder path to revert to the old one, but other than that, everything should work as normal.

Did this fix your issue with the missing context menu items?

Eranjes

@bri_guy , had the exact same problem. Currently no solution for that, only thing the community managers are trying to do is saying "restart computer, restart app, install everything from blank." This will always turn out it the dropbox getting copied as it has a totally mess of a setup process right now. For me also only downloading files working, nothing is uploading.

@Hannah , that will not help. What will help is fixing this mess of a software.
I have provided extensive feedback which should help doing this. It is a total nightmare that this takes obviously months to get fixed when I see all the feedback and threads in this regards. Still waiting for response from the advanced team so far.

bri_guy

"Logging out of the Dropbox app and then back in, caused the folder path to revert to the old one"

Yeah, that's exactly what happened - and it shouldn't have. But it gets weirder: a while after posting my last reply, I noticed a little red alert badge on the menu bar icon. It said that I needed to update the app, and that doing so would move all of my files to a new location as per Mac OS requirements.

The thing is, this was already done after the last app update. Why was it asking me to update again? Who knows. But I ran through the update and let Dropbox (once again) move everything to ~/Library/CloudStorage. Everything's working now, so that's good.

The weirdest part? The version number of the app is the same after I was told I needed to update. So I "updated" from version 168.4.4802 to 168.4.4802.

I guess the lesson learned here is DO NOT LOG OUT OF THE APP, because it doesn't work properly when you log back in.

Eranjes

@bri_guy yeah totally on your side here. It's super unstable and not really transparent what it's doing. I was able to make this setup process a little bit faster:

Workaround I found:
When I first only choose one little file to be synced on startup I will get way faster to moving everything to the new directory. After moving this one small file I can then move on to syncing all the files with selective sync and everything will be set up directly in the new cloud storage. Saved me around 20-30 Hours of waiting.

Solution - How I would expect it to be:
I would expect Dropbox on a blank install directly setting up everything in library/CloudStorage which will save a lot of time and also get around a lot of communicative problems prior to the setup.

Can you check if your version is uploading files from the finder correctly? Thats also not working for me right now.

bri_guy

@Eranjes wrote:

Can you check if your version is uploading files from the finder correctly? Thats also not working for me right now.

Yes, uploading is working for me. I just created a file, put it in ~/Library/CloudStorage/Dropbox on my Mac and confirmed that it's visible at dropbox.com.

Eranjes

@bri_guy , how much files do you have in your dropbox right now? I have more than 800K currently and it looks like it has quite some problems handling this amount.