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Forum Discussion
Dropbox stuck downloading to Windows
I've had a problem for the past few weeks with Dropbox no longer successfully downloading (syncing) from the server to my Windows 10 computer; it is somehow stuck or blocked and "Downloading 34 files...
Hannah
Dropbox Staff
Dropbox StaffThanks for the update here.
I do understand where you're coming from.
Indeed, these two features differ, in the sense that selective sync will remove the files from the Dropbox folder completely.
Whereas, making a folder online-only will just stop it from taking up space in your hard drive, but it will still appear in the Dropbox folder.
If you can just try it out, and let us know, that'd be awesome!
I do understand where you're coming from.
Indeed, these two features differ, in the sense that selective sync will remove the files from the Dropbox folder completely.
Whereas, making a folder online-only will just stop it from taking up space in your hard drive, but it will still appear in the Dropbox folder.
If you can just try it out, and let us know, that'd be awesome!
Ok, with Selective sync I deselected the entire "My Pictures" folder under Dropbox, which had 65 GB and over 65,000 files. That folder is now gone from my computer. After Dropbox finished, it was still "Downloading 38 files...", the same as before with a couple added from my laptop. It is still unable to download any files from the server to local storage in my Dropbox folder, it just keeps trying forever. I also restarted Windows, but the problem remained. Oh, I just realized this was not a folder to which Dropbox had been trying to download, maybe I should try de-selecting one of those? Will do that later today.
I'd be happy to try any other suggestions to get this problem fixed. Does Dropbox have any troubleshooting tools for the user such as a logging or debugging facility I can enable? That would possibly help to find out why Dropbox can't store the files. (BTW Dropbox is enabled for both private and public networks in my Windows Defender Firewall.)
Thanks, Bob
- JayHi BobP45, can you see the sync activity to see which files are trying to download in the desktop app?
Likewise, are there any sync issues when clicking the avatar in the desktop app?Hi Jay
yes, you can see the files Dropbox is trying to download, they are also shown in the screen shot in my original post above. There were a few sync issues due to illegal characters in the file names from Android, but I deleted these files on the Dropbox server and there are no longer any sync issues.
HiHannah
I deselected the Camera Uploads folder with Selective sync. This folder was 350 GB and had just over 100,000 files. (First I had archived its contents to a folder outside of Dropbox, then I deleted them from the Dropbox server and waited for it to complete and show an empty folder.) Now my Dropbox folder on this computer is only 160 GB and has about 130,000 files. After setting up Selective sync and hitting OK, Dropbox got stuck again, this time with "Downloading 101,300 files...". I assume it was trying to index the changes or something like that. I waited over an hour and this status and number of files did not change.
I then quit and uninstalled Dropbox, restarted Windows, did an advanced reinstall of Dropbox and after it finished indexing all the changes, it is unfortunately back to where it was before, now "Downloading 26 files..." forever. (Before it had been 34 files, but 8 of them had been from the Camera Uploads folder which is now empty.) As mentioned before, the Sync history list shows these 26 files either as "Download complete" or as "Waiting to sync..." If I hold the mouse pointer over the ones with "Waiting to sync..." it will start to sync them and then show "Download complete". But the files never appear at the appropriate place in my Dropbox folder on the computer. If I restart Windows, then all these files will again show "Waiting to sync..." and then eventually display as "Download complete". So maybe the files get downloaded but Dropbox can't save them to the local drive for some reason? Can't believe the code doesn't notice the error and flags a problem or at least logs what is happening. (I also again did the "Fix permissions" and "Fix hardlinks" but that didn't help.) Would be good to know what triggered this in the first place as I have been using Dropbox for several years with no problems.
So as it is still unable to download and store any files from the server on this computer, Dropbox is basically useless at the moment. If I add new files to the Dropbox server from another source, the number in "Downloading nn files..." increases respectively and they also don't get really downloaded and stored. FWIW Dropbox works fine on my laptop.
Anything else to try?
Thanks, Bob
- Jay
Thanks for the info, I'd recommend getting in contact with the support team directly for further assistance.
Once you get a ticket ID from the automated response, please let me know the number here so I can locate it in our system.
