Child Item

The app stopped syncing on Linux (two different machines).

My dropbox stopped syncing recently on two different linux machines
after restart. I spent hours trying to upgrade the first one before I
restarted the second one and noticed that it had the same problem. Both
stopped working after working fine for months or years. The first one
has been changed a lot since it stopped working, but I can report about
the second one.

The main symptom is that Dropbox doesn’t sync. “dropbox status” returns
“Starting…” even for hours after typing “dropbox start”.

“dropbox start” produces a lot of messages about loading things, but rarely any warnings or errors. Occasionally it warns about fs.inotify.max_user_watches, but this seems bogus: I have only 13000 folders in my Dropbox and the default is 65536. Nonetheless, I increased my fs.inotify.max_user_watches to 200000. This does not make dropbox sync, and it does not always stop the message that I should increase it to 100000.

“dropbox stop” and “dropbox status” also tell me “DeprecationWarning: isSet()”.

I have successfully run “dropbox update” on both machines.

I have also tried to install a .deb directly from Dropbox:

🌑 $ sudo gdebi dropbox_2024.04.17_amd64.deb
/usr/bin/gdebi:113: SyntaxWarning: invalid escape sequence '\S'
c = findall("[[(](\S+)/\S+[])]", msg)[0].lower(
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
Reading state information... Done
This package is uninstallable
Dependency is not satisfiable: libglib2.0-0 (>= 2.40)
)

Here is some more information:

🌑 $ lsb_release -a
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS
Release: 24.04
Codename: noble

🌑 $ dpkg -l nautilus-dropbox
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
|/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name Version Architecture Description
+++-================-====================-============-========================>
ii nautilus-dropbox 2019.02.14-1.2build2 amd64 Dropbox integration for >

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Comments

Megan

Hey @dushoff, welcome to our Community!

It'd be helpful to quit and relaunch the Dropbox app on your machine or even reboot the machine itself as well.

Also, do you happen to be running any 3rd party apps like antivirus or firewalls, or VPN/proxy settings on your machine? If so, could you temporarily disable them and let me know how it goes?

Also, can you please just check if your computer meets the minimum requirements for the Dropbox app to work correctly?

Keep me posted!

dushoff

Thanks for your response.

I have quit and restarted Dropbox multiple times on both machines. I also restarted the first broken machine, then updated linux and restarted it again. The problem started on the second machine when I rebooted it (which I did to test whether this would happen).

I meet all of the requirements, but as my report states I was _not_ able to install the app (on either machine). I am instead using the nautilus-dropbox package (and have been for many years).

I don't have any firewalls or vpns running.

Both machines have been running Dropbox for months without changes before they stopped working in the last few days.

dushoff

I also deleted all of my dropbox stuff and tried the "headless" approach. That seems to have installed fine, but has the same problem as all of the other approaches. It just says "Starting..." forever.

Hannah

Thanks for the update here, @dushoff.

Can you try our advanced reinstall steps, to see if they help?

dushoff

Thanks.

I'll try when I get a chance... already tried most of it. It's not likely that just redoing things will fix anything now that I know that the same problem happened on four stable machines. How do I get diagnostic help?

Megan

If you try it, and it doesn't work let me know and we'll switch our communication to email @dushoff!

When you say diagnostic help, would you mind elaborating?

dushoff

I carved out some time and went through all of those steps. As expected, it seems hung in the same way. As not expected, it didn't even ask me to re-set-up my dropbox account.

By "diagnostic help" I meant trying to figure out what is actually going on, since that seems likely to be necessary for a solution.

dushoff

A chat person (apparently a bot, but hard to be sure) kept me on the line for 80 minutes the other day, accomplished nothing, and promised an email follow up. There was no email follow up, but I now find that the chat was recorded, tagged "Solved" (my Dropbox is not syncing on four independent machines) and closed. I am now asked to start a new report if I want, but it seems like the system has changed and anyway there is some valuable info (from my side) in those 80 minutes. Is there any way to get that support ticket (ID #24196785) re-opened?

Nancy

Hi from me too, @dushoff. I could locate your ticket in our system and I can see that our live support agent sent you an email indeed after the end of your chat, but there was no reply, which is why the ticket was closed automatically after some time.

Are you able to see the ticket, if you open your email address? If yes, you can still attempt to reply back to it and a new ticket (with a new ticket number) will be automatically generated. This way, you don’t have to provide the same info again.

dushoff

Thanks. You're right that I missed the email. I've clicked on the link and it seems pretty obvious that there is no way to reply to it now that it's closed; I'm not sure why you're suggesting otherwise.

This has been very frustrating.

Note also that there's been no response to the substantive stuff here, even though I took my time following Megan's suggestion without any evidence she had considered the situation and no reason to think it was going to work. My relationship with Dropbox is not going to survive much more of this wheel-spinning.

Nancy

In general, you should be able to hit on the Reply option in the email, which will automatically create the new ticket.

If this isn’t possible though, then don’t worry; we can log a ticket for you instead and check the info you’ve provided so far.

Let me know if we can reach you to this email address, and we’ll get things started.

dushoff

Yes, that email address will be fine.

Nancy

You’re all set, @dushoff! Please reply to my email, when you get the chance.

sarke

We had the same problem. After upgrading the dropbox.py controller script, instead of just

Starting...

it now said

Starting...
To link this computer to a Dropbox account, visit the following url:
https://www.dropbox.com/cli_link_nonce?nonce=XXXXXXXXX

So it seemed it wanted to re-link the machine. After opening the URL, it says:

Error
You cannot log in to the Dropbox desktop app because your device is running an unsupported operating system.
You must now be on glibc 2.27 or higher to log back in and use the Dropbox desktop application. We recommend that you update to a supported Linux operating system (Ubuntu 18.04+ or Fedora 28+) or meet the new system requirements.

So it seems our old dev box needs to be taken out back...

It's really a shame there are no human-readable log files.

dushoff

Thanks for this, but I don't think it applies here (four separate machines dropped, no such error message received).

dushoff

Pretty sure I don't have an email from you.

Nancy

I’ve checked again and the message I sent you should be delivered to the email address you see here. Can you please double check once more (along with your spam folder) and let me know if the email is still not there?

dushoff

I check both of my spam filters and my "quarantine" every day. Nothing from Dropbox except notifications. Can you try again? Maybe try copy-pasting the email address instead of typing it. Also, can you give me a hint that would help me spot it? Will it be from "Nancy"? Will it say "community" in it? Any other key words?

dushoff

I'm assuming it will contain the word Dropbox somewhere.

FlexAssistance

I have the same problem with Dropbox. I will read your thread as well.

Nancy

@dushoff, the ticket should have “Dropbox Community Support” as its subject line. We always copy paste the email address to avoid any typos for this reason.

If you check your email address, you can see and open the email our support team sent you recently, right? I'm referring to the one containing your chat transcript that you mentioned previously.

Other than that, I can suggest visiting this page. Do you happen to be on a paid plan, by any chance? If yes, you should be seeing the option to contact our support team again and you can also provide them your old support number; this way you won’t have to send over the same info again.

alexdao108

Same problem here, dropbox stopped working on 3 different linux machines (3 different accounts) after working seamlessly for several years.

dushoff

Wish you better luck than me. I'm sure there's a simple solution that's something about my files, but all I got was a runaround from three different people (one almost certainly a bot) repeating the same tired advice to try things that I had mostly tried before posting. My solution is to try to wean myself away from Dropbox, which also hasn't been easy.

dushoff

Yes, I'm a paid member. No, I'm not getting back on the same insane treadmill where many hours of my time is apparently worth less than even one minute of an actual professional looking at the actual status of my account. Just repeated advice to try standard things, like it's some kind of miracle that four robustly working machines all stopped syncing in the same week.