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
Suddenly getting sync errors related to file names with special characters
I'm on Windows 10 and have been using dropbox for 5+ years. In the last 2 days, suddenly I have been getting sync errors for around 2500+ files and the error is related to file naming issues. The odd...
Hi,
Very unclear how this can be solved. I will NOT rename my 2000 files that have now suddenly became problematic.. How can I automatically replace all special characters by normal characters?
Thanks
Lusil
Dropbox Staff
Dropbox StaffI am experiencing the issues as well... Files that have been synced between my Mac laptop and Windows 10 desktop for years now (I'm getting errors all of a sudden on files from 2012). I am using a beta (although I don't remember signing up necessarily but I've used Dropbox for forever so who knows when I might have done that). Current version 73.3.94. Issues on about 800 files w/ " . " and " : " that used to not be an issue... Like the previous poster said, renaming those files (especially going back so many years) is not an obvious option.
- Rich
Super User II
MRShepherd77 wrote:
Issues on about 800 files w/ " . " and " : " that used to not be an issue...
The colon " : " has never been a valid character on a Windows system. It's reserved by the operating system, used primarily in drive letters, and Dropbox has never synced files with a colon to a Windows system.
There are other characters that are very similar to a colon that will sync. A Fullwidth Colon " ： " and a Modifier Letter Colon " ꞉ " will both sync to a Windows system. A regular Colon " : " will not, and never has.
The period " . " shouldn't be an issue, as long as it's not the last character in the file name. That, also, has always been the case.
Hello - same problem here. All of the files that I have that now have filename issues are shared with people who are Mac users and were originally saved on or created on the Macs. Some of the files date back to 2008 (nearly the beginning of Dropbox!), some are quite recent. My experience of this issue probably dates from about the same time as the other posters. The files in question include not only files with names that have invalid characters, but also files in directories that have names with invalid characters.
Is there any new information on this issue? I'm also facing >2000 files with filenames/directory names that are now throwing this error message
This issue affects both my personal and my corporate dropbox accounts. I believe the other users who originally created the files are using personal accounts.
