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Forum Discussion
How to disable Smart Sync, really and truly?
Hi all, I know I'm not the first to ask this—Dropbox users have apparently been having problems with it for years now—and maybe there's an answer somewhere in the forum that I simply haven't found...
- Hi raffishtenant, let's see what we can find on this together.
If you don't want to use Smart Sync, all you'd need to do is change your default sync options for new content to "local" and recall any files that are now "online only."
For details on syncing online-only material and selecting the default setting for new content, you can check this Help Center.
Would you like to give this a go, and let me know how it goes?
Thanks!
Megan
Dropbox Staff
Dropbox StaffHi raffishtenant, let's see what we can find on this together.
If you don't want to use Smart Sync, all you'd need to do is change your default sync options for new content to "local" and recall any files that are now "online only."
For details on syncing online-only material and selecting the default setting for new content, you can check this Help Center.
Would you like to give this a go, and let me know how it goes?
Thanks!
If you don't want to use Smart Sync, all you'd need to do is change your default sync options for new content to "local" and recall any files that are now "online only."
For details on syncing online-only material and selecting the default setting for new content, you can check this Help Center.
Would you like to give this a go, and let me know how it goes?
Thanks!
Hi Lori,
Thanks very much for the response! Sure, I'm happy to give this a try. If my understanding is correct, it's essentially what I've already been doing...but perhaps it just needs a bit longer to "take."
What I find peculiar is that I've never (to the best of my recollection) activated Smart Sync, I've always specified "Local" as my default, and I've definitely never specified that a file should be "online only." But a number of them seem to keep ending up that way regardless.
If I'm reading the document you sent correctly, the rsync process I've been running should have the effect of "recalling" the online-only files, which should then become local, and hopefully stay that way for good. Does that sound right?
Thanks again,
Ethan
- MeganSounds about right raffishtenant!
This article describes everything about Smart Sync and it goes into more detail. I think it’s worth checking out.
In any case, if you have any other questions, I'll be one post away!Thanks again, Lori! There are a few things in that second article that I wasn't aware of, especially the sync queue, which I'll definitely want to check out.
My rsync clone has finally completed, and so far I haven't seen any more files being converted to online-only against my wishes, so I'm hoping for the best.
P.S. I've also discovered that the latest update to my favorite Mac disk utility, DaisyDisk, can now connect to Dropbox accounts directly—which isn't immediately relevant to my issue here, but I found it pretty cool and thought that other Mac Dropbox users might like to know.I have the same problem and wish I could get rid of that SmartSync which is absolutely not as smart as advertised!
The problem is that there always seems to be lots of disk-space used by "online" folders. There is lots of ambiguity when using the software as to how the sync is working and if a file or folder is truly available / synchronized or not.
Also the selective sync feature is not working as expected alongside the smartsync. For example, folders I remove from the selective-sync list on my laptop using the Preferences => Sync => Selective Sync settings are not removed from the Dropbox folder, still taking disk space and if I attempt to remove them manually Dropbox will ask my to confirm the system wide deletion of the corresponding folder !!!
What I would love to be able to do is exactly what is described in this articles:
https://help.dropbox.com/installs-integrations/sync-uploads/filesystem-integration#optout
the problem is, my version of the client does not offer the option to "Toggle Dropbox system extension to off."For "project based" work like audio engineering DAW projects and similar where you accumulate lots of top-level project folders over time this is absolutely a deal breaker. I wish I could go back to the old client without the half-baked "smart" sync. The smart sync feature might be great for smaller data set or users which are starting to use Dropbox but for us with hundreds of projects stored in Dropbox, where each project consists of thousands of files under a top-level project folder this simply gives you an ever growing feeling that Dropbox can not be trusted anymore for your mission critical work since you don't really understand what's going on with your files.
