Child Item

I see a lot of selective sync conflicts, after the Windows desktop app randomly logged me out.

Hi,

today when I turned on my computer (Windows 11) the dropbox app had logged me out without me doing anything, out of the blue. I logged back in just for the app to start syncing over 2.5TB from scratch, which was already annoying, but the worst part came when out of nowhere a lot of conflicts due to selective sync start appearing when there were none yesterday.

I have worked on my folders through the years, trying to have everything well organized and I use to follow a folder structure but never under the same route since windows would already warn me anyways if that were the case, but seemingly dropbox is too dumb to follow the folder hierarchie and now there are such selective sync conflicts all over the place.

Not only that, the dropbox folder under windows explorer is not showing the whole folder structure, which is still there when I enter my dropbox account in the web browser, but not in the dropbox folder under windows explorer, which is only showing the conflict folders that dropbox itself created out of nowhere.

Is there any solution to this? It's not the first time I get into a similar situation where the dropbox app has logged me out after an update or similar just to force me sync all my folders and files from scratch, but at least the previous times there weren't any selective sync conflicts as there are now and I'm really considering moving all my files to an external drive and cancel my subscription then dropbox should be a help and not an app that creates errors and issues out of nowhere.

Thanks for any advice, but I'm really starting to get tired of these errors that aren't even caused by the users.

Find more posts tagged with

Desktop

Error Messages

Sync

Windows

Insightful

AcceptAnswer

Closed - Partially Delivered

Delivered

Accepted answers

oonabe

Hi,

thanks for the answer, I finally resolved the issue by uninstalling and re-installing the app completely. The folder was the same as before and I usually have all my files only available in dropbox so they don't take space on my local drive, but for whatever reason it started syncing everything from scratch after I logged in and it was taking really long. I also got logged out on my mobile apps too, but I didn't do anything so I'm guessing it must have been because of an update?

The folders in windows never appeared, I think the origin was that I couldn't wait for everything to sync from scratch again then I had to go out and didn't want to leave my PC on, but when I came back the missing folders would never appear under the windows browser, no matter how many times I tried refreshing the browser or resyncing with the desktop app or the secondary menu options (the ones that appear when clicking the right mouse button).

In the end I had to fully uninstall the app, restart my PC and reinstall it then wait for everything to sync once I had the time to wait for it.

Also when I started resolving the selective sync conflicts I noticed alll the conflicting folders and files were some I used to have shared with family or friends and I had recently stopped sharing them, not sure if this info can help you find any issues related to this.

Anyways thanks for the answer and useful hints and links.

All comments

Nancy

I’m sorry to hear this happened, @oonabe.

When saying that the Dropbox app started re-syncing everything from scratch, do you mean that a new Dropbox folder was created on your computer, after you signed back in, or did the app start re-syncing the files in your existing/old Dropbox folder?

As for the selective sync conflicts you see, these usually occur for this reason. Feel free to send me a screenshot of what you see though, and I can check it, as well.

When it comes to your missing folders, did you also double check your selective sync settings? Are the folders you're missing unselected on that list?

Finally, is there any chance that you were logged out of the Dropbox app due to the Dropbox for Windows update (since you mention something similar at the end of your post)?

Please send over more details and we can take a look.

oonabe

Hi,

In the end I had to fully uninstall the app, restart my PC and reinstall it then wait for everything to sync once I had the time to wait for it.

Anyways thanks for the answer and useful hints and links.

Nancy

Thanks for the updates and the additional info you’ve shared with me! I’m glad to hear you were able to resolve this in the meantime.

If you face any similar issues at some point again, or there’s something else you may need assistance with, don’t hesitate to let me know.