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.
Even though, there is a command line interface on linux (which has start, stop and, soon, pause options), there seems to be no equivalent feature on windows nor on mac. This feature should be easily ...
[Feature request] / [Product Enhancement] "Pause" AND "Resume" via Windows command-line. * * * PLEASE * * *
I need to store AppData on Dropbox for certain applications which work perfectly; * IF * I always remember to manually Pause/Resume syncing from the Right-Click toolbar icon menu before I open the application in question.
- Rich
Super User II
Until it happens (which is unlikely), you can just kill and relaunch the client.
Stop Dropbox:
taskkill /f /im "dropbox.exe"
Start Dropbox:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Dropbox\Client\Dropbox.exe" /home
Not as elegant as pausing and resuming, but it works.
- Bummer, but how would I do this stop/start on MacOSX?
I am astonished that there is no programmatic interface to Dropbox (except on Linux) to quiesce sync operations during backup operations. This seems to be a fundamental requirement for all operating systems using Dropbox. Lack of such an interface tends to increase frequency of conflicted files. Manual on/off is not an economic solution.
For example, on macOS the simple shell command tmutil disable before a backup and tmutil enable following prevents access conflicts and allows the full system resources to be applied to the backup. One could easily conceive of dropboxutil stopsync and dropboxutil startsync as useful tools.
This issue has been mentioned at various times for many years, but has never been expressed as a general need or as useful for accurate backup results. Maybe it is time for Dropbox Software Management to look again at this issue.
Jim, a Dropbox user for years.
An alternative to the task kill suggestion above is to use something like Sysinternals PsSuspend to suspend/resume the process which is much faster and safer than killing and restarting. See: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/pssuspend
Pause dropbox:
pssuspend dropbox.exe
Resume dropbox:
pssuspend -r dropbox.exe
@zlad I tried the pssuspend and while it does suspend dropbox, it doesn't resync. I need this to resync folders that are symlinked in dropbox (it only notices changes on startup or unpause) so this isn't a solution for me like an actual command line pause/unpause command would be.
Hey Dropbox, I frequently run into file access conflicts due to dropbox as a developer. Running builds often breaks without pausing dropbox. Git occasionally gets corrupted due to conflicts with dropbox.
People have been asking for this for years. Bump this up from the bottom of your priority list, please!
