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

Lauri I.'s avatar
Lauri I.
Helpful | Level 6
7 years ago

Lan sync is slower than normal sync?

We have a small office where all the computers are connected with ethernet cables to a gigabit local area network. Our Internet connection is also a really fast optical 1000/100 M. All the computers are high end MacBook Pro's and few PC's running the latest software.

We are still experiencing really slow syncing on dropbox even if we see that the files are being synced via LAN in the dropbox client. We noticed that if we disable LAN sync, the speed actually increase 2-5 times.

We experimented a lot with disabling all speed limitations, enabling and disabling LAN Sync but the LAN Sync performance still seems very slow. Any insights on this? Even if we have a fast internet connection, we feel funny syncing everything via cloud instead of the computers in the gigabit ethernet.

I googled about the topic and found other people are experiencing the same but no solutions or explanations on how the LAN sync actually works.

    • Ioan Vlad V.'s avatar
      Ioan Vlad V.
      Helpful | Level 6

      The LAN Sync, well, simply it doesn't work, everything is set as it should be, i tried all the twiking possible. And i am an IT engineer. It's just impossible to sync 1.5 TB, with the LAN Sync, from PC within the same network. It is running for 3 days&night already, continuously, and it's still at 50% synced. Where is the LAN Sync?? Definetly not working!

      • Ioan Vlad V.'s avatar
        Ioan Vlad V.
        Helpful | Level 6

        Not to mention SSD drives, Gigabit LAN AND Gigabit Internet Bandwith!!! 

  • Computeruser76's avatar
    Computeruser76
    New member | Level 2

    Solution didn't work for me.  0.6 kb/sec using LAN, 6,000+ kb/sec with LAN syncing switched off.  Dropbox allowed through Windows firewall.

    • Jay's avatar
      Jay
      Icon for Dropbox Staff rankDropbox Staff

      Hi Computeruser76, thanks for posting on the Community!

      If you are concerned that LAN sync is not distributing files quickly through your network, please keep in mind a couple of things.

      LAN sync does not begin for individual files until the file is hashed and fully synced for the first time in the host machine. Once the file is ready, LAN sync is able to host this file for 5 simultaneously connected clients. When the file has been synced to those clients, it is able to share that file with 5 additional clients.

      If you need a more in-depth explanation about Dropbox Lan sync, I'd recommend reading our blog post.

      Hope this helps!

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!