"Save to Team Space?" error on Desktop

[JR_1971]

Members of my Dropbox team and I are having a nerve-racking reoccurring issue:

Occasionally we'll get a pop-up from Dropbox desktop where it appears that Dropbox does not recognize my local sync'd team directory, and then asks if I want to sync it to the team space, even though it was just fully sync'd to the team space.

Here are the steps to get it on our Macbook Pros (M1) using external Samsung T7 drives:

1. While Dropbox is running, I ejected the drive safely.
2. When I reconnected, Dropbox started to try to sync hundreds of thousands of files.
3. I rebooted, and got the following message popup:

"Save "(name of my team directory)" to the (team name) team space?

If you save this item here, everyone at (team name) will be able to access it.

Otherwise, you can save them to your member folder(username) and only you will have access.

Move to member folder

Save to team space"

(and Desktop is still trying to sync hundreds of thousands of files.)

My fear is if I select "Save to team space" it's going to make duplicate copies of our entire team directory, since it seems to not recognize my local copy anymore. (or worse, it would blow away what's on the cloud.) I don't dare jeopardize our team shared work... to "fix" this previously we just wiped the drive and started over just to be safe.

I'm going to try to change my settings and tell Desktop to just sync one small folder, and see if it duplicates it or somehow magically just re-links it & syncs it.

Any help would be much appreciated. It's stopping us from being able to collaborate via Dropbox.  😞

Thank you!

[Mark]

The issue has occurred because of step 1 - Dropbox is not intended to run on external drives and by ejecting the drive while Dropbox was running you are actually very very lucky it hasn't just deleted everything across all accounts. 

It probably isn't going to recognise the local copy as Dropbox has no idea 'what' that version is. 

What I'd suggest to try is:

1. Get somebody to backup the data before going any further. There are HUGE risks of data loss here now due to step 1 above. 
2. Unlink Dropbox from your device. 
3. Tidy the directory up online
4. Delete or tidy the directory up on your computer/the folder you want to use
5. Reinstall Dropbox and go through the ADVANCED set up. Navigate to the directory Dropbox is in and let it use that one. It will say its going to use a previous version
6. Give it time to sync and create its databases. It will say that its deleting/moving/joining and leaving shares. You need to trust it and just leave it here, 
7. HOPEFULLY that will fix it.

[JR_1971]

Mark! Thank you very much for your reply! We're going to re-think how we use Dropbox for this project.