Child Item

MacOS Finder windows reverting from Dropbox folders to root directory

I have an M1 Mini (OS 14.3) with two monitors, and since I'm always working on multiple projects, each with its own folder, I keep Finder windows open for each of them, some on different desktops, some with a dedicated desktop of their own.

Recently, when the Mac's been sitting idle for any length of time (typically overnight, but not always), I'll find that all of the windows that pointed to folders in Dropbox are now showing the root directory (see attached pic.) I have to re-map all of the windows back to the DB folder they were originally displaying. This is a huge PITA, and forces me to keep a list of the projects that I'm trying to pay attention to. Rebooting, deleting plists, Safe Mode, and all the usual Mac Finder hacks have no effect.

Folders on a local drive (e.g. "Eclipse stuff" in the pic) are not affected, so this seems to be a Dropbox problem. Is anybody else seeing this? Started happening in early March 2024.

Find more posts tagged with

Desktop

Mac

Insightful

Comments

Walter

Hey @JPDemers - thanks for bringing this to our attention.

Could you please clarify the version of the Dropbox desktop app as shown in your menu bar and the location of your Dropbox folder as per the sync tab in the app's preferences?

Thanks!

JPDemers

DB version is 194.4.6267

Attempting to launch it just opens my DB folder in the Finder; folder is at /Users/Jim/Library/CloudStorage/Dropbox

DB never appears as a running application - nothing in the dock - although Activity Monitor does list it (along with DropboxFileProvider) as an active process.

Nancy

Just to clarify, if you check your menu bar again, close to your clock settings, there’s no Dropbox icon there?

What if you open your Finder > Applications folder, and relaunch the Dropbox app?

JPDemers

The DB icon is present in the menu bar. If I terminate it in Activity Monitor, I can bring it back by re-launching the app. DB seems to be functioning normally; it's just the weird thing with folder windows reverting to root that's a problem.

Jay

Hi @JPDemers, thanks for the information. Please could you contact the support team for them to look into this matter in more detail on their end.

shout_skout

@JPDemers I'm experiencing the same problem. Did you manage to find the solution?

JPDemers

The problem seems to have gone away on its own, at least for the time being. I made no deliberate changes to installed software or startup items, so all I can think of is an update that incidentally resolved the issue. OS is still Sonoma 14.4.1, build 23E224, which dates back to early March (which is when the problem appeared, fwiw) so that's not where the fix came from. I have no idea if DB got a tweak in recent weeks.

I did replace a cheapo Amazon ethernet cable with a quality cat 6 cable (vastly improving my internet speed) at about the time things cleared up . . . perhaps DB was getting borked by the lousy connection? (The cheap cable had been there for a long time, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )

shout_skout

@JPDemers Thanks for sharing your experience on this. I'm on a later Dropbox version than the one you reported, and I'm still seeing this issue, so I don't think Dropbox did anything to fix it. It might just be a rare bug. Did you find any way to backup the session windows for Finder? From what I can tell, Finder saves its state in the "Saved Application State" folder, but this folder is not backed up by Time Machine, so I can't use it to get back the lost window tabs.

JPDemers

A backup app like Carbon Copy Cloner can save Finder's "Saved Application State" folder on a schedule (daily, hourly, or whatever you choose), but good luck parsing the contents.

Finder's "GO" menu has a "recent folders" option that might prove useful, but I don't know how it defines "recent"... i.e. whether a folder opened several days ago and simply left open will be "recent".

shout_skout

@JPDemers

(1) I have Default Folder X and it has a feature called "recently closed" folders. Strangely, it list correctly all the windows that were closed, even the ones that haven't been visited in months. So somehow apps like Default Folder is able to tell that these windows are closed, and I'm mainly using this to recover my lost windows.

(2) I looked into Carbon Copy Cloner and they don't back up the "Saved Application State" folder by default either, because Apple has recommended that they don't back up this folder automatically. It looks like the only way to do it is manually setting up CCC, or use a chron job. It f*cking infuriates me that Apple doesn't make it easy for me to backup and recover from saved application states, even though MacOS has become more and more unstable over the years. If your OS keeps crashing, then at least make it easy for your users to recover from the crash.

(3) FWIW, another strange thing I noticed is that links to folders inside Drobox that are pinned to my Finder's sidebar menu (where it list favorites), were also removed when Finder exited from all Dropbox folder windows. It seems that Finder really thought these folders disappeared.

JPDemers

CCC is very easy to customize. (I use it to back up - i.e., actually save) MS Word's otherwise-near-useless auto-save "recovery" files.)

I think the folders do "disappear" from Finder's view ... or at least the links to the DB folders vanish. (The DB equivalent of an alias losing track of of its target.)