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Forum Discussion
Dropbox not recognizing external drive or showing sync icons
Hi Everyone,
I signed up for a 30 day Dropbox Plus trial. I already had Dropbox Desktop App (version 207.4.5821) installed on my Win Acer Nitro laptop on the C: drive with a Dropbox folder sync...
A further update.
I tried another reboot of the laptop, and the SSD has now reappeared under the "Add backups" within Preferences -> Manage Backups, as below. I will monitor to see if it disappears again like it did after my last reboot. But the sync icons are still not showing up.
Hannah
Dropbox Staff
Dropbox StaffHey plutogenie, thanks for reaching out to the Dropbox Community.
Before anything, I would actually suggest allowing the application to finish syncing and doing any updates it needs to do.
You can confirm this, by hovering over the Dropbox icon in your system tray; does it show that it's "up to date" now?
Also, if you go to your backups page online, do you see the external drive?
Let me know and we'll go from there.
Hi Hannah
Yes, the Dropbox icon is saying everything is 'Up to date'. The external drive appears in the 'backups page' link, and is still appearing under Preferences -> Manage Backups section of the Dropbox client app on the laptop.
However, the first problem I mentioned above, which I thought was related to the external drive issue, is still occurring. That is, the sync icons in the Dropbox folder under File Explorer are still missing.
If I right-click on a folder or file, the Dropbox options are listed (e.g. Copy Dropbox link, Share, Transfer a copy, etc), and the files/folders are syncing with my online account.
But Dropbox will be pretty much useless to me without the sync icons appearing (like the do with OneDrive, Google Drive, etc) in File Explorer so I know the status of each file/folder. It is not acceptable to have to right-click everything to see if the option is 'Make available offline' or 'Make online-only' to determine the status of the file.
Should I reinstall Dropbox? As I said above, the Dropbox Help solution of quitting and restarting Dropbox did not fix the issue, and Dropbox Help offered no other possible causes.
Thank you,
Plutogenie
- Hannah
Hey plutogenie, happy Monday!
Of course, it's super important to have your sync icons, they're part of the app anyway.
I don't think the backup is related to that issue, but can you please follow the steps here, to see if they help?
Hi Hannah
Thank you for the link. I had not come across that thread before in relation to the sync icons despite my Google searches.
I am assuming that I installed Dropbox with admin permissions because I am the only user of my laptop. All installations that I have done come up with a dialogue asking if I'm sure etc. So I don't think that applies.
I therefore looked at the second point in the answer about the limit of 15 overlay icons in Explorer. I checked the registry as instructed and found the list as follows:
The 15th in the list is the one highlighted, which means that 6 of the Dropbox overlay icons would be excluded based on the thread respondent's information.
I understand that you probably cannot advise in relation to Win10 changes, but some additional searching I did about the overlay limit of 15 suggests that in Win10 that issue was resolved in the case of OneDrive because they now use a Status column instead of image overlays. Does that mean I could reorder the overlays to list the OneDrive icons after Dropbox icons? Would this be the only way to solve the sync icon issue relating to Dropbox in Win10?
Regards,
Plutogenie
