Dropbox is stuck in an indexing loop on my macOS 26.4 (File Provider).

Question

I'm using an external drive to store my Dropbox synced files and every time I restart Dropbox or restart my Macbook it forces Dropbox to index.

hI haven't disconnected the external drive once, and I left it plugged in overnight with Dropbox open and when I logged into my Macbook today (from sleep) the Dropbox app was closed and once again decided to index.

This was fine until this morning when the indexing finished, it started indexing again from 0%… I restarted Dropbox, let it index fully and it went right back to indexing…

I'm on MacOS 26.4 and I am using the beta build of Dropbox 250.3.3105.

My drive is formatted in the APFS encrypted format and I am using the File Provider API.

Nancy · Answer

Hey @georgecheese ! Welcome to our Community.

Just to confirm, you mean that you’ve moved your Dropbox folder to an external drive with these steps. Correct?

Since you mention running the beta build, which is experimental, I’d like you to switch over to the stable version instead, as a test. To do this, please turn early releases off at this page, and then download our latest stable version this way (you don’t need to uninstall Dropbox first).

If the issue persists after that, I’d like you to right-click on your local Dropbox folder, go to “Get info” and let me know how many files it contains at the moment.

Keep me in the loop.