My desktop app isn't syncing. Can you offer any ideas as to why this might be happening?

Question

My Dropbox Family account stopped sync-ing for no obvious reason about 3 months ago. There were no hardware or software changes on my desktop at this time.

Because I couldn't find a way to get things working again, despite checking all of the settings and permissions, I have since deleted my account (having backed everything up to an external drive first), deleted the desktop app, then re-signed up to Dropbox Basic with a new email address and downloaded the desktop app again (currently version 204.4.5420). I am using a PC running Windows 11 and have BitDefender for internet security. I believe that I have all of the correct settings and permissions in place to allow files to be sync-ed both ways. Having dragged and dropped the relevant folders from my PC to my Dropbox folder and set up those folders as the ones I want to keep sync-ing in the future, I had hoped everything would work smoothly from there. However, Dropbox is not sync-ing in either direction.

Can anyone offer any clues as to why this might be?

Mark · Accepted Answer

Hi @hebe_gb

@hebe_gb wrote:Having dragged and dropped the relevant folders from my PC to my Dropbox folder and set up those folders as the ones I want to keep sync-ing in the future, I had hoped everything would work smoothly from there. However, Dropbox is not sync-ing in either direction.

Can anyone offer any clues as to why this might be?

I suspect this is your issue.

This isnt how Dropbox works. Dropbox cannot, and does not, sync anything all all outside of the Dropbox directory. It never ever has.

So anything you want to sync and update automatically via Dropbox must be inside of the Dropbox directory and edited / worked upon in that location. By doing what you've done all you did was double the hard drive space required on your machine and created two copies of files - one that you work on and one now old and out of date.