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Forum Discussion
Dropbox has stopped syncing from my external drive
Hi Folks,
I recently moved Dropbox to a (permanently connected) external drive and so far, it's all worked perfectly.
Today, however, I ran a normal backup and when the file was done creating (on...
Hi Walter,
Thanks for replying. The restart helped once but Dropbox has now permanently stopped syncing from this drive. I can stop/start sync and get one "pass" of syncing files added before the restart, but any files added after I restart syncing are not synced.
This is a real problem, as I do not want files that I can't access if the PC goes down on an internal drive.
I'll see if there is anything that might be causing this, like a USB issue.
As Dropbox has only just started doing this, that seems likely, and other people seem to have no issues with external drives and Dropbox.
Another update: uninstalling and reinstalling fixed everything, so not really sure what the issue was here. Syncing now working perfectly again.
Last update: syncing stopped again.
So... I stop and restart sync.
Now it works again.
I mean, OK, I can stop/start when I like, but... not exactly ideal. Funny thing is, it DOES sync from external adds, like if I add a file from Dropbox Web it then shows up perfectly on my external drive. It just does not sync anything I add to the external drive itself once it has finishing syncing.
Maybe a future update will fix it. Here's hoping.
As it is, I now need to start/stop sync manually every single day. Time waster!
Just to confirm current behaviour (presumably introduced by an update, as it used to work):
- The desktop Dropbox app now only syncs one "run" on my external drive-hosted Dropbox, i.e. everything new since I last pause/resume sync.
- Once it has processed this queue (say 12 files or whatever) it will not sync anything from this external disk, whether I add or delete anything.
- If I pause and resume sync it will then process all changes since the last pause/resume.
- If I add/delete anything using the web-based Dropbox, it WILL change those things on the external disk.
This is essentially a bug in the desktop Dropbox, so I will file a bug report (if I can).
