Selective sync folders randomly disappear on macOS since File Provider migration

Question

Hello everyone,

We're experiencing a recurring issue with Dropbox on macOS that affects several users at our company.

For several months, some users have been randomly losing folders selected for Selective Sync. Without any apparent action on the user's part, many folders previously selected for sync become unselected and disappear from the local Dropbox folder.

When this happens, the user must manually reselect the missing folders and wait for Dropbox to reindex and resync everything, which can take a long time (hours in some cases) and significantly impact productivity.

We are interested to know whether other organizations using Dropbox on macOS have observed similar issues since the File Provider transition.

Some additional details:

* The issue affects multiple Mac users, not just one person
* Dropbox is always updated to the latest version via automatic updates
* We use Selective Sync extensively
* The issue is not related to the number of files synced. We're aware of the 300,000 file recommendation, but the issue also occurs on computers that sync much smaller numbers of files
* we started noticing this issue after Dropbox transitioned to Apple's File Provider framework on macOS

Has anyone else encountered similar behavior on macOS? Have you been able to identify the cause or find a permanent solution?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

GaeMoskito · Answer

Hi @Walter, thanks for your reply.

The issue has occurred across multiple macOS versions, including different releases of both macOS Sequoia and macOS Tahoe.

Yes, all affected users belong to the same Dropbox Team account.

Regarding disk space, all affected Macs had sufficient free storage available when the issue occurred. They typically have 1 TB SSD with at least 40% of the space free.

One thing we've occasionally noticed is that the issue sometimes appears after a MacBook has been turned off for several days and then turned back on. However, we have not yet been able to confirm whether this is actually related.

More recently, I have been investigating whether the problem could be connected to Spotlight indexing. I am currently running some tests with Spotlight indexing disabled to see if there is any correlation, although I do not have any conclusions yet.

Please let me know if there are any logs or diagnostics that would be useful for us to collect the next time the issue occurs.

Walter · Answer

Hi @GaeMoskito - thanks for bringing this to our attention.

Can you clarify the exact OS version of the affected computers? Also, am I good to assume that the affected users are all part of the same Dropbox team account?

When you noticed this behavior in the past, do you remember how much hard drive space was available to the computers?

Let us know some additional details and we'll take from there.