'Blender' gives an error when saving a compressed .blend file

[johnfrags]

When I save a .blend file straight in my Dropbox folder, I'll get an error message from Blender.

ERROR: Cannot change old file (file saved with @)

If you pause the sync in Dropbox, the issue disappears. Apparently, the conflict is because Dropbox takes control of the file.

But pausing the sync every time I start working and enabling it at the end of the day is not a very smooth solution.

I read about it on other platforms, but I didn't find any fix for this problem other than pausing the sync.

I need a fix for this problem because it's bugging me and disturbs my workflow.

And it would be nice if you had the option to set the "Pausing sync" at a specific time.

[Hannah]

Hey @johnfrags, thanks for letting us know about this. 

Can you let me know what your computer's OS is?

And also, what is the version of the Dropbox app installed on your computer?

You can see that by hovering your mouse over the Dropbox icon in your system tray/menu bar.

Let me know and we'll take it from there.

[johnfrags]

Sure 🙂

I have Windows 10 & 11 as my OS.

And my installed version of Dropbox is 147.4.4800

[Hannah · Accepted solution]

Thanks for the update, John!

It would seem that this is in fact expected behavior. 

The workaround would be what you already suggested, which is to pause syncing while working on these files.

Regarding specific times to pause syncing for, you can check out and up-vote this idea on our idea board.

[DallasWhitaker]

I had a similar problem. The message said there was no write access to the "C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender" directory, where Blender is installed. Obviously, the program is installed as an administrator (and rightly so, there is less chance of breaking Blender). I did it differently. I reinstalled and downloaded the program from the official website forgehub.net. Then while saving, I selected a folder from the user's home directory (or the user's desktop) and saved the model to an accessible location. If you have the opportunity, it is better to install more than one GPU and use one of them for display and use the rest for visualization.