Child Item

Syncing icons no longer showing on Mac when using the Dropbox desktop app

Background
Hoping someone can please help with this one. Just purchased a new MacBook Pro and installed Dropbox. I use mail-merge documents from my Mac mini which syncs via Dropbox to the MacBook. The location of the newly installed Dropbox is different on the MacBook (previously the Mac iOS forced Dropbox to a specific location in the Library for cloud storage which my Mac mini uses. To rectify the above, I uninstalled Dropbox from my Mac mini and when installing the latest versions, duplicated the path the MacBook uses to enable mail merge from either without having to re-find the source data. All good...

The problem
However - The Dropbox app on my Mac mini no longer shows the sync check marks on any of the contents of Dropbox, though syncing is working and is up to date - the checks are missing (they are however showing on my MacBook as expected).

Software versions
iOS: Sequoia 15.4.1
Dropbox plus plan: v222.4.5042

Troubleshooting tried
> Closing Dropbox including force-quitting all instances in activity monitor, then relaunching Finder and reloading Dropbox;
> Uninstalled/reinstalled Dropbox;
> Checked that all folders (bar one) are set to be available offline

If anyone can please offer any suggestions it'd be very much appreciated :-)

Find more posts tagged with

Desktop

Sync

Mac

Insightful

Closed - Partially Delivered

Comments

Hannah

Sorry to see that you're having this issue, @PJ-77.

When you say that you "duplicated the path", do you mean the path of the Dropbox folder?

I'm assuming this is what caused the issue, but let's see what we can find.

If you click on the Dropbox icon in your menu bar on the Mac Mini, then go to the "sync" tab in the Dropbox app's preferences, which location does it show for the Dropbox folder?

Also, you mentioned that syncing works, so does that mean that if you add a file to the Dropbox folder that has no sync icons, does the file show up in your account on the Dropbox app? I'm talking about files other than mail merge.

Keep me posted.

PJ-77

Hi Hannah,

Thanks for your quick reply. Just to clarify, when I said 'duplicated the path' I purely meant that when I installed Dropbox on the Mac mini, it mirrored the file/path location that Dropbox is installed on the MacBook. This was just so that when merging documents the file/path location of the data file is the same whichever device I am using. The file location for the Dropbox folder on both computers is:

/users/<userfolder>/Dropbox

When I drop a new folder or file into the folder within Dropbox, it does synchronise across all devices in the Dropbox app.

Much appreciated,

Hannah

Thanks for the update and the additional info, PJ!

In that case, can you please follow these steps to perform an "advanced" reinstall of the Dropbox app, to see if that helps?

PJ-77

Hi Hannah,

Thanks for the instructions. I have followed them to the letter and unfortunately it didn't make any difference. After quitting & uninstalling Dropbox I restarted, then used Terminal as suggested - this did its job and the old folder is in trash. I downloaded the latest version and reinstalled - it indexed successfully, but the sync marker still isn't appearing on the Mac mini. Anything else you could please suggest? Is it worth redoing the uninstall but this time deleting all the Dropbox data and let it re-sync from scratch instead of indexing maybe?

Much appreciated,