The app stopped syncing on Linux (two different machines).

[dushoff]

My dropbox stopped syncing recently on two different linux machines
after restart. I spent hours trying to upgrade the first one before I
restarted the second one and noticed that it had the same problem. Both
stopped working after working fine for months or years. The first one
has been changed a lot since it stopped working, but I can report about
the second one.

The main symptom is that Dropbox doesn’t sync. “dropbox status” returns
“Starting…” even for hours after typing “dropbox start”.

“dropbox start” produces a lot of messages about loading things, but rarely any warnings or errors. Occasionally it warns about fs.inotify.max_user_watches, but this seems bogus: I have only 13000 folders in my Dropbox and the default is 65536. Nonetheless, I increased my fs.inotify.max_user_watches to 200000. This does not make dropbox sync, and it does not always stop the message that I should increase it to 100000.

“dropbox stop” and “dropbox status” also tell me “DeprecationWarning: isSet()”.

I have successfully run “dropbox update” on both machines.

I have also tried to install a .deb directly from Dropbox:

:new_moon: $ sudo gdebi dropbox_2024.04.17_amd64.deb
/usr/bin/gdebi:113: SyntaxWarning: invalid escape sequence '\S'
c = findall("[[(](\S+)/\S+[])]", msg)[0].lower(
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
Reading state information... Done
This package is uninstallable
Dependency is not satisfiable: libglib2.0-0 (>= 2.40)
)

Here is some more information:

:new_moon: $ lsb_release -a
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS
Release: 24.04
Codename: noble

:new_moon: $ dpkg -l nautilus-dropbox
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
|/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name Version Architecture Description
+++-================-====================-============-========================>
ii nautilus-dropbox 2019.02.14-1.2build2 amd64 Dropbox integration for >

[dushoff]

Thanks. You're right that I missed the email. I've clicked on the link and it seems pretty obvious that there is no way to reply to it now that it's closed; I'm not sure why you're suggesting otherwise.

This has been very frustrating.

Note also that there's been no response to the substantive stuff here, even though I took my time following Megan's suggestion without any evidence she had considered the situation and no reason to think it was going to work. My relationship with Dropbox is not going to survive much more of this wheel-spinning. 

[Nancy]

In general, you should be able to hit on the Reply option in the email, which will automatically create the new ticket. 

If this isn’t possible though, then don’t worry; we can log a ticket for you instead and check the info you’ve provided so far. 

Let me know if we can reach you to this email address, and we’ll get things started.

[dushoff]

Yes, that email address will be fine.

[Nancy]

You’re all set, @dushoff! Please reply to my email, when you get the chance.

[sarke]

We had the same problem.  After upgrading the dropbox.py controller script, instead of just

Starting...

it now said

Starting...
To link this computer to a Dropbox account, visit the following url:
https://www.dropbox.com/cli_link_nonce?nonce=XXXXXXXXX 

So it seemed it wanted to re-link the machine.  After opening the URL, it says:

Error
You cannot log in to the Dropbox desktop app because your device is running an unsupported operating system.
You must now be on glibc 2.27 or higher to log back in and use the Dropbox desktop application. We recommend that you update to a supported Linux operating system (Ubuntu 18.04+ or Fedora 28+) or meet the new system requirements.

So it seems our old dev box needs to be taken out back...

It's really a shame there are no human-readable log files.

[dushoff]

Thanks for this, but I don't think it applies here (four separate machines dropped, no such error message received).

[dushoff]

Pretty sure I don't have an email from you. 

[Nancy]

I’ve checked again and the message I sent you should be delivered to the email address you see here. Can you please double check once more (along with your spam folder) and let me know if the email is still not there?

[dushoff]

I check both of my spam filters and my "quarantine" every day. Nothing from Dropbox except notifications. Can you try again? Maybe try copy-pasting the email address instead of typing it. Also, can you give me a hint that would help me spot it? Will it be from "Nancy"? Will it say "community" in it? Any other key words?

[dushoff]

I'm assuming it will contain the word Dropbox somewhere.