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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. -----------   Hey folks —   I have Dropbox v100.4.409 ins...
  • mayhplumb's avatar
    mayhplumb
    5 years ago

    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.