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
Green tick with white backround
I've been a user and paid subscriber to Dropbox for about a decade. I use Drobox for sharing my files across multiple devices and occasionally for sharing files with other people who don't always have Dropbox accounts. I don't work as part of an organisation so I don't use any of the team or business related features. I often recommend people use Dropbox over other cloud storage as I've always been impressed with Dropbox.
I've just started seeing the normal green background tick replaced with a white background tick on multiple files and folders. According to the help pages these white background ticks can only appear on folders yet I have them on multiple files.
The help page says this green tick with a white background and green circle 'Contains files that are both available offline and online-only. A white circle with a green outline and a green checkmark can only appear on a folder. It means the folder contains a mix of files and folders that are ”available offline” and “online-only”.'
Looking at the files it looks like some of these are files I've previously shared with other people but that doesn’t match the description here. My recolection is the shared folders had a different icon but that seems to have changed.
What would be nice would be for a company to be consistent with their icons rather that occasionally going for a total redesign just because someone has said it's fashionable to have a new look. If you have to have a new look please, at least, keep the basic symbolism consistent with the past for the sake of your long term loyal customers. When you do release an update please also release an update of the help files as the statement that 'A white circle with a green outline and a green checkmark can only appear on a folder' is not true as I have it all over my files.
I had the same issue and reached out to Dropbox help. The below explanation was included in the response:
-----------------------------
[Dropbox help response]
-----------------------------
We’ve recently updated our sync icons to give you a more accurate idea of what sync state your files and folders are in. For example:
- A file with the available offline icon
green background with a white tick) means that the file is downloaded to your PC/Mac. Files in this state have been made available offline by right clicking the file and selecting Make available offline. - A file with the available icon (
white background with a green tick), means that the file is downloaded to your PC/Mac. Files in this state have been made available by opening the file with a double click or using a 3rd party app. - A file with the online-only icon (
grey background with a white cloud), means that the file is online-only and is merely a placeholder file which takes up close to zero bytes on your PC/Mac
A folder’s sync icon will depend on what files are contained within that folder. For example:- If a folder contains at least 1 online-only file then the folder’s sync icon will be online-only
- If a folder contains zero online-only files and at least 1 available file then its sync icon will be the available icon
- If a folder contains only available offline files then its sync icon will be available offline
-----------------------------
-----------------------------
This recent change removes crucial functionality and makes working with Dropbox a lot harder. I don't care to know if a file is available offline because I opened it, or if it's available offline because I clicked the available offline option. I don't know what benefit knowing that distinction is meant to give me. But daily I need to quickly at a glance see which out of hundreds of root folders have any "available offline" files in them, and I need to see which root folders don't. The old icon system worked so beautifully for that. Now I have to search through thousands of sub-folders individually to see if they contain any "available offline" files or not.
I hope all the users speaking up about this can help Dropbox revert back to the previous system.
- A file with the available offline icon
Hi Jay, thanks for coming back with this info. It seems I was wrong about the icon being related to shared files as other replies have pointed out. I've also found these green and white backgrounds on files I havn't shared. They are not at all intuitive.
What I want is that Dropbox works the way it used to when I became a subscriber ten years ago.
- I want ALL of my files to be available offline.
- AND I want ALL of my file to be stored on my Dropbox space so all my other PCs that are connected to my account also have ALL of my files.
- I don't want any of them to be available only offline becase that's no use to me if I need to access a file when I don't have Internet access.
How do I do that?
- Rich
Super User II
Andy S.6 wrote:
What I want is that Dropbox works the way it used to when I became a subscriber ten years ago.
Nothing has changed with how Dropbox handles your files when they're stored on your device. If they aren't already, just mark all of your files as Available Offline and everything will operate as it always has.
