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Cannot establish a secure connection

Your computer will compare your system date to the expiration date of our SSL certificate. If your system time is stuck in the past or so far in the future that it is outside of Dropbox's SSL certificate expiration date, a secure connection will not be established. This is easily corrected by changing your system time to the current date...

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Rich

There isn't anything for Dropbox to fix. Issues such as this are almost always caused by something specific to the computer, and are not a wider Dropbox issue that they have control over.

Possible causes are antivirus or firewalls interfering with the connection, incorrect date and time settings, etc. See the following help article for more information.

https://help.dropbox.com/sync/files-not-syncing

wdalston

In updated and related news, I went into settings and turned off Proxy. Bingo! Now DropBox is updating automatically. (This despite the corporate firewall that evidently exists, or maybe I just imagined that.)

Either way, your suggestions are much appreciated.

All comments

Mark

... ?

QhillBoi

October 2017.....Needing DropBoxTechSupport to come up with a fix for this issue.

Rich

TexTech

I am glad to see someone else is currently having this problem as well. Despite what one reply says, I do not think the problem is with my computer. I am not using any of the anti-virus they list and I am not going through any proxies. Specifically, I have gotten the message that my date/time is incorrect and that is why a connection could not be established. Yet I verified at TIME.GOV that my system date and time are absolutely current and correct. Now this is a "cleaned" used computer I bought recently and it is running Windows 7 Pro. Is Dropbox having issues with this older release of Windows?

Mark

No it isnt as long as you are running a recent version of Dropbox from www.dropbox.com/downloading.

Rich

TexTech wrote:
Is Dropbox having issues with this older release of Windows?

No. Windows 7 is still a supported operating system. I have Windows 7 computers using Dropbox without a problem.

langsstangs

This has worked flawlessly on all my computers for over 2 years. Now Im getting this error and cant fix it. Ive tried reinstalling, ive tried using your troubleshooting. The date and time are spot on. I dont run virus protection, only windows defender, as i dont surf the web on this computer. Something is not right. Its a surface 4 pro with windows 10.

Rich

Dropbox Preferences have the Proxy setting set to No Proxy?

wdalston

This has nothing to do with my computer. The date and time are set via a push from our corporate servers. Hell, I cannot even change the date on my box myself, anyway, due to log-in permissions. (Yes, our corporate security is somewhat, "zealous." Still, DropBox should not be giving me this error, since the date and time shown *ARE* correct.

Rich

An incorrect date and time are not the only cause of not being able to make a connection to Dropbox. There could be a firewall that is blocking the traffic (perhaps by that zealous corporate security team), antivirus, and many other reasons. Simply put, something either on your computer or on your network is blocking Dropbox. It's a local issue. If you haven't already, the first thing to try is to make sure that the Proxy setting in Dropbox preferences is set to No proxy (assuming, of course, that you don't use a proxy server).

wdalston

You are probably right! The new year is an *ideal* time to roll out more security protocols and break something! Thanks.

wdalston

Either way, your suggestions are much appreciated.

Eletros

Omg Yes! it worked! i haven't been able to connect discord and at one point i couldn't connect One drive. Weird to think it was the proxy .-.

jamesbnh

sent me to correct help page about changing proxy settings. For some reason my Dropbox preference setting was on auto detect fro proxy. I didn't change anything, so i guess someone updated something and it changed or became an issue. Any way, changing proxy setting to no proxy and rebooting iMac solved the issue.

stevewrightuk

Had the same symptoms on my PC. Turned out that I was running a program called Fiddler at the same time. Stopping that and restarting Dropbox fixed the problem.