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Forum Discussion

Kris J.'s avatar
Kris J.
Helpful | Level 5
7 years ago

Dropbox indicates 'downloading xx files' _forever_

Dear community,

I have a perfectly correct Dropbox installation, no noteworthy issues with illegal filenames and I have performed all possible kinds of troubleshooting.

Even so, every so often, mostly when migrating to a new PC, Dropbox will become stuck in an eternal 'downloading' session.

What bothers me is perhaps not that this happens but that there is apparently no way to check _which_ files are problematic.

It is bewildering to see that the Dropbox desktop client does not offer any kind of decent user-accessible logging or other type of error reporting that would empower end-users to resolve these issues.

What gives?

How can I see which 322 files are problematic in my particular case? Drilling down through thens of thousands of files in the hopes of finding one with a sync issue indicator is really not an option.

Thanks,

Kris

 

 

Desktop
Setting up the apps
Sync
    • Kris J.'s avatar
      Kris J.
      Helpful | Level 5
      7 years ago

       Thanks for the quick reply Jay

      To give some more context:

      I indeed know that symlinks can sometimes cause issues. It might even be the root issue here. That being said though, on different machines with identical selective sync settings, identical DB client SW and OS versions,  one machine will get stuck while the other will not.

      Only specific thing here was the DB client release, I was indeed using a pre-release one. I have since downgraded to the latest stable version which I am running, on all machines, on macOS 10.14 (18A377a). Oddly enough that _instantly_ resolved the issue so I am quite happy (and appreciative of the suggestion).

      That being said, I assume there must be a way to figure out/display what the Dropbox client is trying to achieve by enabling some kind of Debug logging or by knowing which part of the Dropbox specific file attributes you need to look at.

      It would make everything so much easier to troubleshoot... Is there really nothing to see such info?

      • Jay's avatar
        Jay
        Icon for Dropbox Staff rankDropbox Staff
        7 years ago
        Glad to hear that the syncing problem was resolved by downgrading to the stable version!
         
        Currently, there isn’t an option to see the actively syncing files via the desktop app. The only way would be to see the files in the Dropbox folder with the syncing icons to determine which ones were syncing, though if you have multiple subfolders and locations, this won’t be easy!

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