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Dropbox Stuck at "starting" and "checking for changes"

Hi all,

Since 11th December 2018, my Dropbox application on my mac has syncing issues.

The status on my Dropbox application would either say "Starting" and "Checking for changes" when I restarted it. And it doesn't change even after leaving it alone for over 12 hours.

Sometimes the files will show up as "blue spinning icon" and sometimes it will have a "green tick", but the files are definitely not uploaded (could not see it on the web or my mobile phone).

Also selective sync is not working, it does not update the required folders.

Specifications:

Mac OSX 10.11.6

Dropbox 63.4.107

Size of Dropbox: 18 GB

I have done the following:

1. Reinstall the application (twice)

2. Reduce the number of files synced to be under 300,000

3. Unlinked and linked back my account (twice)

4. Leave it overnight to sync for 12 hours (twice)

I am short of just deleting my entire dropbox files and start over again but my internet is very slow and it will take me weeks to re-download everything.

Anything else I could try?

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Accepted answers

johndoe789

Hi Lusil,

I found out what was wrong, my macbook SSD has been degraded recently (only able to perform 90MB/s write, 700MB/s read). Once I ease off the background tasks, Dropbox was able to start syncing the files.

I hope that in the future Dropbox app will include a diagnostic tool to show what's exactly is happening. This took me a week to figure out the issue.

All comments

Lusil

Sorry to hear that, @johndoe789.

Initially, I’d recommend checking this article out for a few more suggestions on the matter. Could you also please ensure that you don’t have any symlinks in your Dropbox folder that could affect the performance of the desktop app (check out step 7 of this link for more info)?

Let me know what you find!

johndoe789

Hi Lusil,

Thank you for your reply. I did perform a symlink search and none turns up.

I have reduced the number of files in the dropbox again to sub 200k files and lets see how it goes.

Do you have any idea when the next dropbox update may come out? Maybe a new upgrade could fix it

Lusil

Thanks for the swift reply, @johndoe789.

I’m afraid there isn’t a specific timeline for the next update of the desktop app, but you can find more info here. In the meantime, I’d recommend an advanced reinstall, where you can apply the selective sync settings before syncing starts.

Let me know how it goes!

johndoe789

Hi Lusil,

I hope that in the future Dropbox app will include a diagnostic tool to show what's exactly is happening. This took me a week to figure out the issue.

Lusil

Thanks for letting me know, @johndoe789, I’m glad to hear that you were able to get to the bottom of this.

I’m more than happy to pass your comments along to the dev team for future consideration and if you have any other questions in the future, don’t hesitate to give us a shout.

In the meantime, have a wonderful day ahead!

jlaff

how do I "ease off the background tasks"?

Lusil

Hello @jlaff,

Welcome to the Dropbox Community!

You can find more info about which processes are running or are scheduled to run upon startup by navigating to your OS's task manager or activity monitor. This should give you an initial idea about the relevant tasks that are working while you're on your computer.

I'll also leave this open for any other users that may have any additional input on this.

Let me know if you have any other questions in the meantime!

This thread is closed due to inactivity. Please feel free to create a new topic here.