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Forum Discussion
Special Character in Filename causing lack of syncing
I'm moving my files around - syncing via the cloud between a Mac and a PC - and, while I was doing a visual check to ensure the files were correctly synced, I noticed one file that was not syncing. Eventually, after trying various things to try and force a re-sync, I noticed there was a vertical bar character '|' in the filename. I removed that from the filename and the file now syncs.
Is this expected behaviour (I can't imagine it would be) or is it a bug? How do I report a bug? I have a free account and there is no option listed for actually contacting support.
The file is syncing correctly from my Mac to the cloud but it is not then syncing from the cloud to my Win10 Pro PC. As far as I know I'm using the up-to-date cliente on the PC but I can't see how to tell.
- Lusil
Dropbox Staff
Hello dropyak, welcome to the Dropbox Community!
Certain characters can be used on some operating systems, but not others. This also means that, while your files may be visisble on the website, they may not be on a computer that can't handle those characters.
In this case, you are right! The vertical bar you mention is an incompatible character on Windows devices. You can find more info about this, here.
Let me know if you have any other questions, thanks!
Thanks, Lusil.
Does Dropbox give any notification to the user that a file wasn't synced?
If I hadn't done a file-for-file comparison, I wouldn't have seen this; I can't imagine that someone with many more files than I would be interested in manually verifying the results of a sync.
- Lusil
I understand where you're coming from and, in general, to prevent sync problems in the future, make sure to avoid naming your files with any of these characters as Dropbox can't sync them on some platforms.
If you have any other questions, we're only just a post away, so just give us a nudge.
In the meantime, I hope you have a lovely day ahead!
Feature requests:
1. Warn users if a file or folder contains characters restricted on some operating systems.
2. Add a "find" feature in the web console that can help find files or folders using restricted characters, so they can be renamed.
3. Add a global "replace" feature in the web console in which a non-restricted character (such as a hyphen) can be used to replace any instances of a restricted character (such as a colon, pipe, or slash).Thanks,
L.
- Walter
Hey lenpal, thanks for your feedback!
For future reference, note that you can post your feature requests (preferably separate) in our Ideas section.
You can take a look at this thread for more tips on posting your ideas.
Cheers!
To Dropbox: I have thousands of files named with a special characters. I can't synch these without renaming them, and my life won't be long enough to rename them all. If there is no workaround on this, I can't use DropBox, which didn't have this feature in previous versions--used it for 10-15 years!
Please help or tell me to leave.
