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mayhplumb's avatar
mayhplumb
New member | Level 2
5 years ago

Desktop client stuck a "Syncing..."

Edit #2 tldr: Dropbox on Ubuntu works fine on fresh install, but quickly decides every file is "unwatched" and refuses to sync anything.

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Hey folks —

 

I have Dropbox v100.4.409 installed on an Ubuntu 18.04 machine (64-bit). My dropbox folder is on an external 2TB Seagate hard drive (Ext4).

 

The problem is simple: I turn open Dropbox and the status remains "Syncing..." indefinitely. It fails to upload/download new documents. It does, however, immediately start using a huge amount of CPU power (110%, according top).

 

I had this issue a couple days ago. I restarted dropbox, restarted my computer, unlinked & relinked... Eventually, I fixed it by completely uninstalling dropbox (including deleting the hidden data folders) and re-installing. [I didn't delete my local files because I don't want to re-download 300 GB of files. I did the little switcheroo thing where you rename your original Dropbox folder "Dropbox B", let Dropbox create a new folder, then rename again.] It took a few hours for Dropbox to index all the files, but then it finished up, everything looked good with little check marks etc., I thought i was in the clear.

 

I came back today to do some file management, and the problem is back. I haven't changed anything on Dropbox in the past two days, so I am assuming that some file/folder is causing the issue. I've seen people have similar problems when they have a large number of files, but I'm around 60k, well below the 300k limit, and also I haven't been moving things around. One post mentions problems when your file structure is more than five levels deep, but I've been using Dropbox on fathoms-deep file structures for years without a problem. Other posts mention that when they re-link their account, they're able to identify the specific file that's causing trouble, but when I re-installed earlier everything just looked fine.

 

Anyway: What else should I do to try and identify the problematic file/folder, or is there some other Dropbox syncing limitation that I might be running into?

 

Edit: Using 's answer from here (plus further info from github and StackOverflow resources), I have identified a possible issue. The command

i=0; IFS=$'\n'; for a in `ls -R1 /path/to/Dropbox`; do ((++i)); done; echo $i

spits out 70916 — i.e. all of my Dropbox files I guess. (And if I run dropbox from the command line, I get the same "Unable to monitor entire Dropbox folder hierarchy" error reported in the StackOverflow post.) However, I've set inotify's max_user_watches and max_queued_events both to 100000, to no avail!

 

Edit #2: I have tried two new things. I checked on filename length, since the Dropbox help pages indicate that they are capped at 255 characters. Using the command

find -exec basename '{}' ';' | egrep '^.{150,}$'

I found four files with more than 150 chars, but none with more than 200 chars.

 

Secondly... While I was having the syncing issue, the command (pulled from 's post)

(IFS=$'\n';for i in `ls -R1 /path/to/Dropbox`; do if [[ "$i" =~ ":" ]]; then cd `echo "$i" | sed "y/:/\//"`; echo -n "In folder: "; pwd; dropbox filestatus; fi; done) | grep -vi "up to date" | grep -vi ".dropbox:" | grep -vi ".dropbox.cache:"

indicated that every single file in my Dropbox folder was unwatched. I uninstalled/re-installed Dropbox again. It indexed my files, indicated that all was good! I was able to add a new file and have it sync. I re-checked for unwatched files, it indicated a number of .DS_Store, a couple of badly formed names, but nothing particularly unusual. However, clicking around between folders in Nautilus seemed to break it again. It didn't indicate that there was a problem, but the checkmarks all went away and adding a new file didn't generate any syncing response. Closed Dropbox, re-opened, and the same problem was back, all files are being watched, nothing is syncing. <angry face>

 

  • Okey dokey, I seem to have fixed it. Here's a solution post.

     

    Symptoms: Upon start-up, Dropbox was stuck perpetually syncing upon start-up. Every single file was "unwatched". This persisted through re-install. Fiddling with Inotify settings had no effect. However, a clean install, downloading select files to a clean Dropbox/ folder, worked as long as I deleted the .dropbox.cache/ folder right after setting up syncing.

     

    Diagnosis: I believe the issue was that I had a full backup of my computer on Dropbox, which included hidden Dropbox settings files. I normally keep Dropbox on an external hard drive; it includes a directory called computer-backup/, where I periodically use rsync to backup my entire local disk. In a recent backup I copied hidden files as well as normal ones. This worked for the first upload, but I think after that the hidden dropbox files within computer-backup/ were causing chaos. This persisted on a clean install because when Dropbox started downloading, it included those hidden files in the list of files to download, that's why deleting .dropbox.cache/ helped.

     

    My solution:

    1) I fully uninstalled Dropbox

    2) I removed both .dropbox and .dropbox.cache/ from my external disk Dropbox/ folder

    3) I removed all hidden files from computer-backup/ (both on my external drive and on dropbox.com)

    4) I re-installed Dropbox & re-aligned the Dropbox location with the Dropbox/ folder on my external drive

     

    I did a couple of restarts, some general fooling around, and this fix seems to be stable.

    • mayhplumb's avatar
      mayhplumb
      New member | Level 2

      Hi Walter,

       

      I completed the advanced reinstall and the problem has persisted (i.e. Dropbox initially started indexing files, but as soon as I restarted Dropbox it was stuck again). The main difference between the "advanced reinstall" and a normal reinstall is making sure the permissions are all in order, I guess?

       

      Things that came up:

      - nautilus-dropbox could not be uninstalled as it was never installed; as far as I can tell, nautilu-sdropbox is no longer part of the normal dropbox package for ubuntu?

      - chattr identified a variety of symlinks

      - when I went to move Dropbox to a new location, it got stuck at 99% moved; I had to quit the application to move forward

      • mayhplumb's avatar
        mayhplumb
        New member | Level 2

        Alright, another update. Progress is being made, I think.

         

        1) I did ANOTHER full reinstall (getting very bored of this process).

         

        2) I left Dropbox linked to the default location on my local disk. I changed the selective sync settings to include ONLY an empty test folder I had previously made using the web interface. Dropbox successfully settled having downloaded that one test folder + the three files that are loose in my Dropbox folder.

         

        3) I restarted Dropbox. The syncing error was back. All the files were unwatched. [I take this to mean that there is something going on with Dropbox, not with my files.]

         

        4) On a mere whim, I deleted the .dropbox.cache folder that is in the main Dropbox folder. I was surprised but delighted to see that the problem went away! I restarted Dropbox again to check — all good!

         

        5) I moved the Dropbox location to my external disk. Restarted again — still all good!

         

        6) I paused syncing. Changed the selected sync preferences to include my normal range of foldes.

         

        7) I quit Dropbox. I did the rename dance to make my original Dropbox folder line up with Dropbox's location. I deleted .dropbox.cache from my original Dropbox folder. I restarted Dropbox. Sadly, my problem is back. Whomp whomp.