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johndoe789's avatar
johndoe789
Helpful | Level 5
6 years ago

Dropbox Stuck at "starting" and "checking for changes"

Hi all, Since 11th December 2018, my Dropbox application on my mac has syncing issues. The status on my Dropbox application would either say "Starting" and "Checking for changes" when I restarted i...
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  • johndoe789's avatar
    johndoe789
    6 years ago

    Hi Lusil,

    I found out what was wrong, my macbook SSD has been degraded recently (only able to perform 90MB/s write, 700MB/s read). Once I ease off the background tasks, Dropbox was able to start syncing the files.

    I hope that in the future Dropbox app will include a diagnostic tool to show what's exactly is happening. This took me a week to figure out the issue.

Lusil's avatar
Lusil
Icon for Dropbox Staff rankDropbox Staff
6 years ago
Sorry to hear that, johndoe789. 
 
Initially, I’d recommend checking this article out for a few more suggestions on the matter. Could you also please ensure that you don’t have any symlinks in your Dropbox folder that could affect the performance of the desktop app (check out step 7 of this link for more info)? 
 
Let me know what you find!
  • johndoe789's avatar
    johndoe789
    Helpful | Level 5
    6 years ago

    Hi Lusil,

    Thank you for your reply. I did perform a symlink search and none turns up.

    I have reduced the number of files in the dropbox again to sub 200k files and lets see how it goes.

    Do you have any idea when the next dropbox update may come out? Maybe a new upgrade could fix it

      • johndoe789's avatar
        johndoe789
        Helpful | Level 5
        6 years ago

        Hi Lusil,

        I found out what was wrong, my macbook SSD has been degraded recently (only able to perform 90MB/s write, 700MB/s read). Once I ease off the background tasks, Dropbox was able to start syncing the files.

        I hope that in the future Dropbox app will include a diagnostic tool to show what's exactly is happening. This took me a week to figure out the issue.

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