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

L B.'s avatar
L B.
Explorer | Level 4
4 years ago

Gray X on Files

Hi,   I have thousands of gray Xs on my dropbox files and they will not open. When I click on the file I get an adobe notification that says "somethings gone wrong" or if it is Words, it simply f...
Desktop
Sync
  • GreyWolfSweden's avatar
    GreyWolfSweden
    3 years ago

    In case you are absolutely sure that a particular file is LOCAL, and not involved in any syncing scheme (DropBox or OneDrive), you can reset the grey X icon flag in Windows CMD with the command ATTRIB -O  <myfile>

     

    Do a CD to the folder with the problematic file and perform: attrib -O "my problem file.txt" on that file.

    In my case, the X flags appeared after reverting from the DropBox Backup scheme for Desktop back to the pristine LOCAL

    file status, which apparently did not succeed: Most of the icons in my Desktop were tagged with the grey X after disabling the backup sync. With  DIR/B > repair.bat  in CMD you can edit the the file repair.bat to contain the attrib -O command for each row and then execute the repair.bat script. Make sure to put double quotes "..." around file names with blanks or strange characters. Only do this if you are absolutely sure that the files are NOT involved in a syncing scheme (DropBox, OneDrive, or other).

    Example of such a repair.bat:

    attrib -O "AAA_README.doc"
    attrib -O "Acid-Jazz-playlist-55-pieces.txt"
    attrib -O "Project-555.txt"
    attrib -O "PhDs.txt"
    attrib -O "Winehouse.docx"

    The grey X flags on the icons will disappear within seconds.

Jay's avatar
Jay
Icon for Dropbox Staff rankDropbox Staff
4 years ago

Hi L B., thanks for providing these details!

 

It sounds like you might have another cloud service running on your machine, which is causing the grey X icon to appear. This old thread has more details on this behavior.

 

The icons could also be for files marked as online-only, could you try marking them as local to see if this helps, especially with opening the files on Adobe or Word?

 

This will help me to assist further!

  • L B.'s avatar
    L B.
    Explorer | Level 4
    4 years ago
    What I'm currently doing is syncing 100% back to local (argh). We will see what will happen... saying 2 days to sync and I switched from wifi to wired connection

About Create, upload, and share

Find help to solve issues with creating, uploading, and sharing files and folders in Dropbox. Get support and advice 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!