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Dropbox has stopped syncing from my external drive

MikeB1971

Hi Folks,

I recently moved Dropbox to a (permanently connected) external drive and so far, it's all worked perfectly.

Today, however, I ran a normal backup and when the file was done creating (on the external drive), Dropbox just sits there and does nothing. Copying files to anywhere in the file tree on the external drive does not trigger any sync.

Any ideas?

I've not changed anything as far as I know although of course Windows may have done any number of things on its own, as usual.

The drive is working fine in all other aspects, as the backup was created with no issues.

I understand that using Dropbox from an external drive is not perhaps recommended but it kinda makes no sense to have the backups on one of my internal SSDs as if the laptop can't be started, I can't access them, so I'd have to download them all from Dropbox anyway...

UPDATE: Pausing and restarting sync got things moving again but I'd still like to know why Dropbox just stopped syncing for some reason... are there any logs, anywhere, maybe?

Thanks,

Mike

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Walter

Hi there @MikeB1971 - thanks for bringing this to our attention and I'm glad to see that it was sorted after pausing and resuming sync.

As for the logs you mentioned, you can check for sync issues in the app's preferences after you click on the Dropbox icon in your system tray.

I hope this helps a tad.

MikeB1971

Hi Walter,

Thanks for replying. The restart helped once but Dropbox has now permanently stopped syncing from this drive. I can stop/start sync and get one "pass" of syncing files added before the restart, but any files added after I restart syncing are not synced.

This is a real problem, as I do not want files that I can't access if the PC goes down on an internal drive.

I'll see if there is anything that might be causing this, like a USB issue.

As Dropbox has only just started doing this, that seems likely, and other people seem to have no issues with external drives and Dropbox.

MikeB1971

Another update: uninstalling and reinstalling fixed everything, so not really sure what the issue was here. Syncing now working perfectly again.

MikeB1971

Last update: syncing stopped again.

So... I stop and restart sync.

Now it works again.

I mean, OK, I can stop/start when I like, but... not exactly ideal. Funny thing is, it DOES sync from external adds, like if I add a file from Dropbox Web it then shows up perfectly on my external drive. It just does not sync anything I add to the external drive itself once it has finishing syncing.

Maybe a future update will fix it. Here's hoping.

As it is, I now need to start/stop sync manually every single day. Time waster!

Just to confirm current behaviour (presumably introduced by an update, as it used to work):

The desktop Dropbox app now only syncs one "run" on my external drive-hosted Dropbox, i.e. everything new since I last pause/resume sync.
Once it has processed this queue (say 12 files or whatever) it will not sync anything from this external disk, whether I add or delete anything.
If I pause and resume sync it will then process all changes since the last pause/resume.
If I add/delete anything using the web-based Dropbox, it WILL change those things on the external disk.

This is essentially a bug in the desktop Dropbox, so I will file a bug report (if I can).