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K4Unl's avatar
K4Unl
Helpful | Level 6
8 months ago

Dropbox not syncing even after reinstalling

So here's a doozy.

I've recently reinstalled my windows. My Dropbox folder was on a secondary drive, so didn't get formatted.

I have reinstalled Dropbox, and pointed it to the old dropbox folder. It spent a few days indexing, and decided then that it needed to upload and download a bunch of files. This is all fine, but it's not actually _doing_ that. It just knows that the files have to be done, adding new files will up the counter, but it's not doing anything. I can sometimes click on the icon in the bottom right corner and it'll suddenly go to 75 kbps, jumping down to 20 and then back to nothing (just no speed indicator at all)

 

I've reset ownership, i've reinstalled the application. I'm at a loss. I've been googling for a few days now, trying loads of suggestions from this forum but i cannot figure it out. Who can help me?
Dropbox was working fine before i reinstalled.

  • Hi Walter Thank you for checking in.
    Right before your message i decided to give it another try. Doing the same as i did before:
    Uninstalling, renaming my old folder. Reinstalling, pointing it to the same drive, waiting for it to get done syncing and download, quit dropbox, renamed my old folder again, and started dropbox.

    After indexing my 300k+ files, it suddenly started downloading and uploading. I have no idea what i did differently but i'm happy it worked out.

  • Rich's avatar
    Rich
    Icon for Super User II rankSuper User II

    K4Unl wrote:

    I have reinstalled Dropbox, and pointed it to the old dropbox folder.


    I never point Dropbox to an existing folder. The process that I use and has always worked flawlessly is to first rename the existing Dropbox folder to Dropbox_OLD or similar, then reinstall Dropbox and let it create a new Dropbox folder in the same location. As soon as it's done, pause syncing or exit the Dropbox application, copy (to be safe, copy, not move) the files from Dropbox_OLD into the new Dropbox folder and then resume syncing or launch the app again.

     

    It will still go through the re-index process and upload/download as needed. There's no way to avoid that. But this way has always worked for me.

    • K4Unl's avatar
      K4Unl
      Helpful | Level 6

      Hmmm.. I'm not sure i did that, it shouldn't matter as i removed the .dropbox-cache folder from the directory.
      I have over 1TB of files locally, and my drive isn't big enough to have that twice.

      • Walter's avatar
        Walter
        Icon for Dropbox Staff rankDropbox Staff

        Hey K4Unl - sorry to jump in here; are you still having issues with this?

         

        If so, could you please send us a screenshot of the app's status and version as shown in your system tray at the moment?

         

        Thanks!