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Forum Discussion
Dropbox has stopped syncing from my external drive
Hi Folks,
I recently moved Dropbox to a (permanently connected) external drive and so far, it's all worked perfectly.
Today, however, I ran a normal backup and when the file was done creating (on the external drive), Dropbox just sits there and does nothing. Copying files to anywhere in the file tree on the external drive does not trigger any sync.
Any ideas?
I've not changed anything as far as I know although of course Windows may have done any number of things on its own, as usual.
The drive is working fine in all other aspects, as the backup was created with no issues.
I understand that using Dropbox from an external drive is not perhaps recommended but it kinda makes no sense to have the backups on one of my internal SSDs as if the laptop can't be started, I can't access them, so I'd have to download them all from Dropbox anyway...
UPDATE: Pausing and restarting sync got things moving again but I'd still like to know why Dropbox just stopped syncing for some reason... are there any logs, anywhere, maybe?
Thanks,
Mike
- Walter
Dropbox Staff
Hi there MikeB1971 - thanks for bringing this to our attention and I'm glad to see that it was sorted after pausing and resuming sync.
As for the logs you mentioned, you can check for sync issues in the app's preferences after you click on the Dropbox icon in your system tray.
I hope this helps a tad.
Hi Walter,
Thanks for replying. The restart helped once but Dropbox has now permanently stopped syncing from this drive. I can stop/start sync and get one "pass" of syncing files added before the restart, but any files added after I restart syncing are not synced.
This is a real problem, as I do not want files that I can't access if the PC goes down on an internal drive.
I'll see if there is anything that might be causing this, like a USB issue.
As Dropbox has only just started doing this, that seems likely, and other people seem to have no issues with external drives and Dropbox.
Another update: uninstalling and reinstalling fixed everything, so not really sure what the issue was here. Syncing now working perfectly again.
