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files appear on Mac and online, but not on PC

What am I doing wrong?

I have a system of collecting these files for a writing comp. Download Word or PDF doc from emails, drag them from Downloads to Dropbox-->ParticularFolder (one of two) When I get 10 files in a folder, I then create a sub-folder, and share that with the 2 judges. So far, I have done this 4 times. No worries. The 5th, however, does not work. On my Mac (where I do the work), I can see the 5th folder and the files inside it. On my PC, using DropBox online, I can see the folder and files. But on my PC, I see the folder, and NO FILES. I have tried 1. giving it time; 2. hitting SmartSync - online and local (no idea); 3. giving it more time; 4. opening the files from the DropBox online on my PC; 5. giving it more time.... Cannot see the contents of that folder. I did all of this over the past 48 hours. I've read online articles ...
What am I doing wrong??? Thanks.

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Walter

Hey @frillypants, thanks for using Dropbox and happy Friday!

If the app is up to date in your system tray/menu bar, it sounds like those files may have an incompatible character in their names.

Could you have a look at this Help Center article and let me know if that's the case?

Thanks!

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Walter

frillypants

YES! There was under 18 category, which I named as U/18. Hooray!!!! So simple, thank you.

Walter

Hooray! Glad to hear it's sorted now @frillypants.

See you around the Community and have a lovely week ahead!

dpl1979

Is there a way of searching my dropbox to find any files containing incompatible characters?

I am seeing issues with the number of files downloaded but can't find a way to search for these characters?

Many Thanks.

Rich

@dpl1979 wrote:
Is there a way of searching my dropbox to find any files containing incompatible characters?

There is, but it's been broken for nearly a year. It will just hang your browser at the moment.

https://www.dropbox.com/bad_files_check

gnet-Jim

We have a strange situation that I haven't been able to figure out yet. At my church, we have one volunteer who creates slides & banners for our presentations, she is using a mac. When she drops files into a shared folder, none of the windows computers can see her files in the folder.

I can see them in the folder in the Dropbox app on my iPhone. To make them accessible to the Windows machines, I have to "share" the documents from my phone to the same shared folder. My phone doesn't complain that I'm overwriting files it had found in that folder. Once I share the file to the same location, then the Windows machines can see them.

Would appreciate any info if anyone has had this issue before.

Thanks!

Здравко

Hi @gnet-Jim,

Most probably your volunteer uses Windows incompatible symbols into file/folder names and/or incompatible formatting. Unfortunately Windows is very capricious about possible symbols and formatting. Ask she don't to set leading or trailing spaces and not to use symbols that Windows count as special, like colon, slashes, etc. Such symbols are not a problem for Mac and most other OSes but not for Windows... That's it.

Hope this helps.

gnet-Jim

Thank you! I'm checking with the user, but when I see the files in Dropbox on my phone, I'm sharing them to the same folder in Dropbox, without any change to the filename. I would think if that was the issue I'd have to change the names to get them to show up.

Здравко

@gnet-Jim wrote:
... I see the files in Dropbox on my phone, I'm sharing them to the same folder in Dropbox, without any change to the filename. I would think if that was the issue I'd have to change the names to get them to show up.

Not necessary. Most present days phones are able to handle automatic adaptation of such filenames and make them compatible to Windows (striping leading and trailing spaces, for instance); something you may didn't note yet.

Hannah

Hey @gnet-Jim, I agree with Здравко here, could it be possible that the file names contain any of the characters here?

gnet-Jim

Yep Здравко , called it. I logged in via the web UI and I could see all the files. The user had been using colons in the filenames, which made them invisible to Windows.

Megan

Awesome @gnet-Jim!

If you need anything else, let me know!