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rse1982's avatar
rse1982
Explorer | Level 4
2 months ago

Dropbox stuck on "Starting" after upgrading to Ubuntu 24.10

I have recently upgraded to Ubuntu 24.10 and have noticed that Dropbox never gets past starting. 
I have tried uninstalling and reinstalling and setting fs.inotify.max_user_watches to 1 million and it still does not work. 

The reason for setting fs.inotify.max_user_watches to 1 million was because this was the number that stopped this happening in 24.04.

Has anyone else come across this issue and has found a resolution?

 

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

    Hi there, rse1982, thanks for reaching out to the Dropbox Community.

     

    Would you mind taking a look at this article, to make sure your computer has the minimum requirements for the Dropbox app to work?

     

    Also, can you let me know about how many files you have in your Dropbox folder?

     

    Let me know and we'll go from there!

    • CelineFlora's avatar
      CelineFlora
      New member | Level 2

      Hi Hannah, I and many others are having the same issues. 

       

      My computer has the minimum  requirements for the Dropbox app to work.

       

      I have a bit more than 100,000 files in my Dropbox folder.

       

      Thank you.

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

    Hey CelineFlora, sorry to hear about that! 

     

    Have you tried the steps outlined here, by any chance? 

     

    Keep me posted, and we'll take it from there!

    • CelineFlora's avatar
      CelineFlora
      New member | Level 2

      Hi, unlike the user  who posted in your link above, my Dropbox preferences show the Dropbox folder just  fine, it is still configured.  So it must be something else.

       

      Could you please advise?

  • rse1982's avatar
    rse1982
    Explorer | Level 4

    I managed to fix this, but the solutions I found were wrong. The solutions all said to add

    fs.inotify.max_user_watches=524288

    to

    /etc/sysctl.conf

    This is the wrong file as this holds only temporary variables, so to load these, you would have to load these each time the computer starts with the following command.

    sysctl -p

    The file to edit is:

    /usr/lib/sysctl.d/30-tracker.conf

    This file the amount automatically loaded when Ubuntu starts. Once I changed this file and rebooted Dropbox started and commenced indexing.