Menu bar icon not appearing

[skiblues]

I used to be a Basic member but am now a member of a Family Plan.  I am not able to get the Dropbox icon on my menu bar on a new Mac - Monterey 12.01.  I have quit and trashed the application and have reinstalled a couple of times, but nothing.  I can't for the life of me get the icon on my Menu Bar.  Does the Menu Bar have a space limitation?  I would think not.  Any help out there?

[Hannah]

Hey @reggoboy, sorry to see you're having trouble with this.

Can you please give us the ticket number for your communication with our support team, so we can look it up in our system?

[Studio_BW]

I am on Dropbox Plus plan. Had 2 iMacs and 1 MBP today drop their sync today Jun 16th 2023: Dropbox icon disappeared from menu bars on all computers and sync stopped. Did the advanced re-install, on the newest (MBP, Monterey) the app crashed after indexing for 10mins. Advanced re-install seems to install an earlier version than DB website. Cleared all previous data with Terminal using DB helpdesk instructions.

Still not working, and the previous offered solution did not solve anything. Dropbox on Activity Monitor "not responding" and not present on Mac OS X Monterey menu bar.

[Mark Siegel]

I don't know if this will help your problem with crashing and not syncing, but I posted a solution a while ago (which I can't locate now) for the Dropbox icon disappearing from my menu bar after I upgraded to a newer MacBook Pro and to OS Monterey for the first time:

Apparently, because of menu bar space lost due to the top-center black area (for the camera), there's limited space for menu bar icons.  I finally tried removing icons for apps I didn't really need in the menu bar, and as soon as there was enough space my Dropbox icon suddenly appeared, and was fully functional.  I've since upgraded my Mac to OS 13 Ventura, and the Dropbox icon is still there and remains functional (just tested it).

I do find that if I launch certain apps which are marked to appear on the menu bar, that icon will appear, but others (sometimes Dropbox) will temporarily disappear to allow space.  But as soon as I quit that app, the missing icon(s) will return.

If you can get the Dropbox icon to reappear by removing others but it still doesn't solve the connecting/syncing problem... sorry but that's beyond my limited knowledge.

[Megan]

Hi @Studio_BW, sorry to hear about that! 

Just wanted to check in with you, and ask if you're still facing the same issue. 

Do you get any specific errors when you start-up the app? If so, feel free to share them with us here. You can send the full .txt file back to me.

If it's a different kind of error, a screenshot would be most helpful.

One last thing: is the error happening every time you launch the app or only sometimes?

Keep me posted!

[reggoboy]

" because of menu bar space lost due to the top-center black area (for the camera), there's limited space for menu bar icons.  I finally tried removing icons for apps I didn't really need in the menu bar, and as soon as there was enough space my Dropbox icon suddenly appeared, and was fully functional."

Thanks, this was the fix 🙂 

The reason I didn't come to this conclusion sooner was because I had a solid 2+ inches of empty menu bar space between the "notch" and the first visible menu bar icon to its right. That would have been plenty of space to fit a whole bunch of menu bar icons. 

The culprit was MenuMeters. I forgot I had it installed, since it never showed up. But with 8 cpu cores and a bunch of other things displayed, it probably required at least 1/3 of my entire screen width. And it seems that since it couldn't display ALL of it, it displayed NONE of it. And worse, since MenuMeters apparently had some precedence over Dropbox, Dropbox never displayed at all. Turning ALL MenuMeters options off finally revealed the Dropbox icon. 

Turning select (smaller; ie, non-CPU) MenuMeters back on now shows them to the left of Dropbox. Apparently they "stack to the left" in the order that they are enabled.

Thanks.

[normloomer]

I followed all the steps in the Advanced Reinstall, but the Dropbox icon still does not appear in my menu bar. 

A little background: I replaced my 2017 MacBook Air with a 2023 M2 MacBook Air. I have two Dropbox accounts, and my preferred one had been connected to the Dropbox app. I used Migration Assistant to copy the contents of the old MBA to the new one. Somehow, in the process, the connection to the preferred account was lost, and the Dropbox app connected to my secondary account. 

According to what I have read, the solution is simple: Click on the Dropbox icon in the menu bar and select the option to change accounts. But ah, there's the rub. The Dropbox icon does not appear in the menu bar. So I'm stuck. 

[Mark Siegel]

Good to know the fix worked!  Thanks for letting us know.

[Mark Siegel]

If you look earlier in the thread, or perhaps in a related thread, you should be able to find the fix I posted earlier:

On newer MacBook Pro models:

"...because of menu bar space lost due to the top-center black area (for the camera), there's limited space for menu bar icons.  I finally tried removing icons for apps I didn't really need in the menu bar, and as soon as there was enough space my Dropbox icon suddenly appeared, and was fully functional."

[reggoboy]

" as soon as there was enough space my Dropbox icon suddenly appeared"

My caution about this comment, which caused the problem to go on months longer than it needed to for me, can be found in my previous post.

The key is that there was "enough space" per se for the Dropbox icon in my menu bar. Maybe close to 3" of unused space. The gotcha comes from the way macOS handles allocating space. Imagine you go out to eat at a restaurant with a date and they tell you to wait. There are tons of tables for 2 free. But there's a group of 10 ahead of you, and they don't have room for that group. And since that group came in ahead of you, they insist on seating them before they seat you.

That's the lousy algorithm Apple is using to fit things into the menu bar. In my case, MenuMeters wanted a ton of space, so Apple chose not to display either MenuMeters OR anything in line after it.

So you can't just look for free space and you can't just look at what's already displayed when you consider what to free up. You have to go hunting for anything that is even TRYING to display in the menu, and turn it off. Or at least turn it back on ONLY AFTER turning Dropbox on.

[normloomer]

Yes! The problem was that there was not enough space for the Dropbox icon in the menu bar. The black camera notch bumped off icons that were happily in the menu bar on my old 2017 MacBook Air. After deleting some little-used icons and reinstalling Dropbox, all was well. 

I can't be the only person running into this problem when moving from an older Mac to a new one that has the camera notch. It would be really helpful—and save a lot of time and stress—if the installation software or MacOS would warn the user that there was not enough space in the menu bar to install the icon.