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Forum Discussion
Why do these com.dropbox.attributes files show up everywhere?
These files are cluttering up my folders. There seems to be one for every real file that I have. I'd like to delete them.
What are they and where did they come from? And how can I stop them?
Hi,
The issue you're seeing is a Mac issue that occurs when copying files with extended attributes metadata into a file system that doesn't support them.
Depending on the information stored in the metadata, you may or may not need these files.
These files are called AppleDouble files and more information on how to handle them can be found by searching for: "apple double files"
To avoid this issue if you have your Dropbox folder on an external drive, we recommend ensuring that the drive is formatted in the default file system format for the Operating System that is installed.
A quick fix to remove those files: from the website you can search "attributes" in the search bar.
You can select all the results and delete them all together.
Thank you!
I've heard from support and basically these are caused by some operating system adding "extended attributes" to the file. Most likely MAC OS. Extended attributes are things beyond the basic "file creation date" etc. These attributes are not supported on other OS so dropbox creates a little file to store them - at least that's what I think is happening. Although it might be the other way around that MAC is creating the file.
I ran the xattr -cr mydropboxfolder to recursively remove these attributes and then deleted all the extended files, but they came back.
Bottom line is that I don't think dropbox thinks that this is their fault. I think they are wrong and they need to at least make these files hidden.
I'm not happy nor am I impressed with this.
