Syncing issue on macOS 10.15 Catalina

Hey @J-Sync, thanks for staying in touch here!

As a follow-up step, I’d recommend unlinking & relinking your account on your Mac once, since it recreates the local database. Can you let me know if you’ve already done that?

You could also check out the steps below. Please note that it is very important to follow these steps specifically as failure to do so may result in other issues:

#1. Make sure the Dropbox desktop application is running & click on the Dropbox icon in your menu bar. → Then click next to your profile picture in the Notifications panel.

#2. Select 'Preferences' & then navigate on the 'Account' tab.

#3. Hold down the 'Option/Alt' key.

#4. Click on the 'Fix Permissions' button (make sure you're still holding down the 'Option/Alt' key.

#5. You may be prompted for your a username and password, this is your computer login credentials, not your Dropbox account ones.

Once you get a chance to have a look at my pointers, please keep me updated on the results!

All comments

Hello @care4rei.

Thanks for raising this thread. Welcome to Dropbox Community!

Please let me know if you reinstalled after your OS went stable and also the amount of files you are syncing and your Internet speed.

You can try a speed test. - http://www.speedtest.net

Also try speeding it up taking the steps offered here: https://help.dropbox.com/installs-integrations/sync-uploads/faster-sync

Thank you!

care4rei

My network bandwidth is 300Mbps.All the applications over intenet work fine except dropbox.And the dropbox on the other PC runs Windows 10 on the same nework works fine too.The problem starts with the macOS 10.15 Catalina.Dropbox works fine in my MBP on macOS 10.14 and before.

I will be glad to investigate this further. Syncing difficulties can occur on all Operating systems and versions. It will be very helpful for us to take a look into device details, so I can send you an email to do this if you wish.

However, I would like to go through the basic troubleshooting steps here before we do that. Bear with me, I have a few more things to confirm with you. :smile_cat:

Please confirm your application bandwidth settings.
Please confirm the size of the files you are syncing.
Is this the first sync for this device?
Let me know if by any chance you have created symlinks to your Dropbox files to sync them with another app.

Please feel free to ask questions if you need guidance to confirm the above.

Thanks for the additional info.

Zbig

Exactly the same here!

After all night of syncing ca. 160 000 files it started syncing them again when I restarted my MacBook Air.

Polish version of Dropbox.

OBOFR

Hi,

I confirm it too, since the Catalina upgrade I have the same issue

care4rei

I just resolved the problem by reinstall macos catalina.I'm disappointed with the official Dropbox support,many people here have the same problem,but they didn't offer any helpful solution.

Hello everyone @OBOFR @Zbig!

Syncing is a process that can fail due to various reasons. It would be great to provide more details so that I can identify the cause of the issue and understand if you are all facing the same.

If the issue described is the same for all, we can offer one solution, but if not I will be happy to troubleshoot with all of you. Please get back to me with additional information.

Thank you!

P.S. @care4rei thanks for letting us know how you solved this and your feedback.

Zbig

After the latest system update everything works fine - without any action from my side.

https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Desktop-client-builds/bd-p/101003016

So glad to hear that @Zbig!

For those that don't know how to find our latest stable version. Here is a link:

Cheers!

There is a problem with the App in Catalina, well more to do with the Mac OS new security features actually.

I fixed my sync issue, which is as described above exactly, by doing the following:

System Preferences>Security & Privacy>Privacy - Select Full Disk Access from the left and ensure that the Dropbox App has it's box ticked (you will need to click the locked padlock at the bottom of the window to put a tick in the box.

No need to uninstall / reinstall as others have suggested, for some reason Catalina defaults the Dropbox App to not having full disk access and you need to maually change that.

Chris

Randy_

I'm having the same problem and have tried changing the disk access to full. It does not seem to have changed anything. For days now, I have had 20,896 files to sync.

9,537 to upload and

11,358 to download.

Once in a while it will say 100+ days to complete but there is no movment. I have check my bandwith and I have 100mb down and 60mb up.

I have tried uninstalling and reinstalling DB, unlink and relink sync folder, shutdown and restart both DB and my computer. So far, nothing has worked. The number of files to sync is growing. It started at around 1,700 a few days ago and continues to increase.

Everything else seems to be working fine after the update to Catalina, only dropbox has been effected.

I appreciate your patience, troubleshooting this on your own. Since you have already tried reinstalling , as mentioned, I can create a ticket for you if you wish @Randy_ .

I want to find out why the number is increasing instead of decreasing like it should when syncing is processed. I can also include technicians of another level of support in our email communication to help you solve this.

Let me know if I can email the address associated with your Community profile. Thank you!

Fiona I’ve had tickets raised for this which have been escalated to ‘advanced’ support people at Dropbox but with all due respect they’ve been useless!!
They simply keep suggesting the problem is due to symlinks or hard links and despite me responding to each and every support email as per the instructions, detailing exactly what I have found and tried, they are not getting back to me.
The problem is still present for me and an increasing number of users but Dropbox support is not doing anything to fix it.

Chris

I am sorry to hear troubleshooting this has been a headache and thank you for sharing your feedback. When we know what is going on, we can take steps to improve our service and your experience.

Having your ticket numbers, I can report feedback directly on your cases, add notes to help with the process and this way push it a step forward towards the resolution.

I will be more than happy to follow up with your cases @chrisacam.

Thank you for your patience.

J-Sync

I'm having the same problem on Catalina 10.15.1 with the latest stable version of Dropbox. On reboot, Dropbox starts syncing around 30,000 files. I don't think I have that many! It eventually completes, then repeats the behaviour on the next reboot.

I hope you find a fix for this soon.

Welcome to our Community @J-Sync. Thank you for describing the situation there. You are on 84.4.170. Correct? If you are, have you tried reinstalling the Dropbox desktop application, after this started happening?

@chrisacam, I located some cases you had with us and reported your feedback. They are all closed. though. Since the technical difficulties are ongoing, I'd be more than happy to start a new ticket to help, with your permission.

Thank you both!

@Fiona thank you. You may have seen cases as I have been trying to get your technical team to engage and resolve this. These cases should NOT have been closed as there is clearly still a problem. I did not request they be closed.

I responded to every email I received from the team, but did not get replies to my responses. They will say they sent replies but I never received anyting other than the initial case creation emails. And no, there is nothing in my Spam or Junk email!!

I gave up and am currently trialling alternative providers because it is obvious Dropbox do not care about these issues or ensuring their customers receive adequate responses.

If there is anything you are able to do, then great, but I suspect any raised or re-raised case will just be lost again.

This is really bad form on the part of Dropbox.

I want to make up for the support experience you've had up to now.

There are cases, where our emails don't go through. I found tickets that closed due to inactivity. So, I understand you were not receiving them. I have reported this experience. Is your email an Alias by any chance? (Alias is an email redirecting your emails to another address/inbox)

Do you have a firewall that could be blocking our emails?

I want to start with suggesting to update to our latest stable version: https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Desktop-client-builds/Stable-Build-84-4-170/td-p/375469

If this doesn't stabilize your syncing, I will personally create another case with you that I will follow up myself to make sure you are getting responses.

Thank you @chrisacam.

Thanks @Fiona.

No Firewall, No Alias.

No trouble with receiving the initial case-creation emails, only the follow ups don't seem to come through.

I'm currently on App v85.3.138 which is newer than the one you suggest I suspect.

Syncing as of today does seem more stable, so perhaps the App has done an auto-update.

Thanks for the info.

This is a Beta version (under testing). Please downgrade to stable.

Step 1. Go here and turn off "Early realeases".

Step 2. Download and run this stable version. https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Desktop-client-builds/Stable-Build-84-4-170/td-p/375469

Let me know if that helps.

J-Sync

Thanks, Fiona. Yes - I've tried reinstalling the latest version (84.4.170) twice, and it hasn't altered the behaviour.

Is there any sort of debugging information I can give you to speed this along?

Any ideas what could be causing this? My first thought is that it's something to do with the new file security system in Catalina. I have allowed Full Disk Access to Dropbox though. I'm stumped. Please help sort this ASAP.

@J-Sync Mine is actually quite stable now and I've not had any sync issues for a few days. Mine also stopped the constant attempt to sync on every reboot.

The way I fixed this in the end is to enable the Dropbox Beta install (Mine is now at v85.3.138 ) as the most current stable release did not help me.

I also updated my Mac to 10.15.1 which has just in the last few days been released by Apple.

I also gave full disk access to Dropbox.

All that, following a reinstall of Dropbox from scratch and a complete unlink, delete all Dropbox files from Finder, then relink of the Mac to my Dropbox account and wait for download of all files again, all seems to have resolved this for me.

I'm not convinced it will do the same for others however, because I see other forum posts about this where people have also tried this and it hasn't fixed it.

Hope that helps.

Chris

Hey @J-Sync, thanks for staying in touch here!

As a follow-up step, I’d recommend unlinking & relinking your account on your Mac once, since it recreates the local database. Can you let me know if you’ve already done that?

You could also check out the steps below. Please note that it is very important to follow these steps specifically as failure to do so may result in other issues:

#1. Make sure the Dropbox desktop application is running & click on the Dropbox icon in your menu bar. → Then click next to your profile picture in the Notifications panel.

#2. Select 'Preferences' & then navigate on the 'Account' tab.

#3. Hold down the 'Option/Alt' key.

#4. Click on the 'Fix Permissions' button (make sure you're still holding down the 'Option/Alt' key.

#5. You may be prompted for your a username and password, this is your computer login credentials, not your Dropbox account ones.

Once you get a chance to have a look at my pointers, please keep me updated on the results!

J-Sync

Thanks, Jane. That seems to have fixed it! I relinked, reset permissions and hard links.

I'm running beta v85.4.155.

Perfect @J-Sync, happy to hear we got that squared away!

On a brief note, you’re currently running our latest Stable Build 85.4.155. :wink:

Feel free to ping us back here if you have any Dropbox-related questions in the future; it’ll be a pleasure to work with you again.

Enjoy the rest of your day for now! 🤓

rdejaegher

Very frustrated with Dropbox. This is the second time in the last couple months where I've had constant syncing/indexing issues. It does appear to be related to macOS Catalina since updating these issues started again.

I've tried a lot of steps listed else where.

- Checking for symlinks

- Fixing permissions

- Going into Terminal and resetting permissions

- Fixing hardlinks

- Also tried installing a beta version to see if that would fix anything

I don't necessarily want to Unlink my account cause I'm worried about creating sync conflicts when I pair the account again.

Is there anyway to try isolate if it's a particular file or folder that's causing an issue?