I've got a selective sync conflict on all my devices

mrrssy

Devices
Microsoft Surface Pro 11, Apple M4 MacBook Air, Apple M2 Mac Mini, Apple iPad Mini, Apple iPhone 16 Pro, Samsung Tab S11, Samsung Tab S7

All of a sudden this morning almost every other file in my dropbox now has selective sync conflict. What is the main reason these conflicts happen in the first place?

Is it because I have so many different device types synced to DropBox? On my Mac Mini the DropBox folder is setup on an external drive.

I tried reading but all the information on the topic seems vague. Does anyone have any insight on what to do to prevent this mess?? I really appreciate your help in advance. 

Jay

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

If you have a selective sync conflict, this means that you have previously deselected certain folders in the selective sync prompt. Afterwards, you manually deleted those local folders, and then later recreated the same folders under the same name.

When you re-enabled those folders in the selective sync prompt, as there were now two folders with the same name, the conflict folder was created to ensure the data wasn't lost.

In order to prevent this in the future, we recommend not deleting the folders from your computer manually, and allow the Dropbox desktop application to remove those folders automatically when you deselect them.

If you have any further queries, feel free to message back.