You might see that the Dropbox Community team have been busy working on some major updates to the Community itself! So, here is some info on what’s changed, what’s staying the same and what you can expect from the Dropbox Community overall.
Forum Discussion
Taylor B.7
7 years agoExplorer | Level 4
Smart sync just started downloading everything to local
I have a folder with 8,000 large files. While I was working (but nowhere near the folder nor the files contained therein) I suddenly started getting notifications of "Smart Sync Download" and that all the files were "Syncing and Opening"
I have not accessed any of these files, although it's acting as if I had manually clicked each one, or perhaps changed the status to "Local file"
Changing the root folder to "online only" is not stopping the process.
- In cases where you see files downloaded from Dropbox to your computer that were previously online-only, and you didn’t open or change the files, this could be caused by another application. Some applications need to look at your files to work, and that makes Dropbox download the files.Please take a look at our article here for more details on why you are experiencing this issue.Let me know if this helps or if you have any further questions!
- NorahDropbox StaffAs a starters, we need to double check what status icon do you see on your files. Online-only should be a cloud icon, or the green tick which means it’s synced locally.Thanks in advance for your reply!
- Taylor B.7Explorer | Level 4
I paused syncing while it was doing this because I did not have the space to locally sync all these files. As I was waiting for a response, I finished up my work day.
For a few minutes, I was getting "Smart Sync Download Failed" (not 100% sure of phrasing but that was the gist) messages as files failed to locally sync due to the paused status.
I shut down my computer for the night. When I rebooted just now, it is no longer paused, but simply says "up to date" (whereas yesterday it said something about syncing 8,000 files).
The folders were a mix - most were still gray, but the few subfolders containing files that had synced locally had the green tick. I updated the root folder to "cloud-only" and they are now all "online only" and file properties reveal that while the size is 169GB the "size on disk" is back down to where it would be expected for online only - 32mb.
I will respond if this strange behavior starts again. I am wondering if some sort of indexing happened in the background of Windows to trigger this. These were mostly video clips, so maybe some process akin to "let us helpfully identify all your media folders, no need to ask first, we'll just do it!" tricked dropbox into thinking the files were being opened and needed to be downloaded locally.
Hopefully this behavior will be hard to reproduce ;)
- NorahDropbox StaffAs the issue has been resolved, the reasons on why you were experiencing this issue could be many, however, keep us updated if anything further comes up.Have a great week ahead!:slight_smile:
About View, download, and export
Need support with viewing, downloading, and exporting files and folders from your Dropbox account? Find help from the Dropbox Community.
Need more support
If you need more help you can view your support options (expected response time for an email or ticket is 24 hours), or contact us on X or Facebook.
For more info on available support options for your Dropbox plan, see this article.
If you found the answer to your question in this Community thread, please 'like' the post to say thanks and to let us know it was useful!