You might see that the Dropbox Community team have been busy working on some major updates to the Community itself! So, here is some info on what’s changed, what’s staying the same and what you can expect from the Dropbox Community overall.

Forum Discussion

bwhight's avatar
bwhight
Helpful | Level 5
8 years ago

Smart Sync - Windows Explorer Search Not Working

I am testing Smart Sync for our team.  All fine but when files are 'Online Only', Windows Explorer search can't fined them.  I have tried a few PCs in our team and all have the same problem, so I don...
Desktop
Setting up the apps
  • Lucio's avatar
    Lucio
    7 years ago

    The Windows search functionality, that allows finding files set to online-only through the Smart Sync feature, is now available on computers with versions of Windows 8 and above, starting with the beta version 60.3 of the Dropbox desktop application that you can find here.

    When this is available in the stable version 60.4 next week, your computer should automatically update and receive the fix.

    Thanks to all that reported this and we appreciate your patience on this matter.

    Happy syncing!

mxoh's avatar
mxoh
Collaborator | Level 10
7 years ago

Hi there,

I am a Dropbox Business admin using Windows 10 with Dropbox desktop app installed. For online-only files, can they be indexed and searched through file explorer rather than dropbox.com? I initially thought that this is not possible but someone I know who is also a business user said that he is able to search his online-only files on file explorer. 

  • Jay's avatar
    Jay
    Icon for Dropbox Staff rankDropbox Staff
    7 years ago
    Hi there, online-only files generally cannot be searched for in the OS search engine, since the files are physically not on the computer. Even the filenames you see aren’t really there, since each file is a placeholder grabbing basic details from the Dropbox site.
     
    As to why that other user is able to search, it might be to do with their configuration, or if the files were previously made local and a cache somehow exists on their machine. Regardless, this shouldn’t really happen, so this might only be a temporary behavior.
      • Jay's avatar
        Jay
        Icon for Dropbox Staff rankDropbox Staff
        7 years ago
        I’ll move this thread into that one for my colleague to see it. If OS search is supposed to be able to find the online-only files, then our dev team is already on the case it seems.

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