Dropbox is re-syncing my files again?

[Viqhaas M.]

Why on earth is this happening ?!? its resyncing everything again nothing has been changed why ?

[ryan l.5]

make that 313,000 files, almost 7 years of work, not very happy right now

[ryan l.5]

maybe because amazon was down yesterday, DROPBOX SUPPORT the TIX are garbage, please respond to your own forum where is the MODERATOR?

[Flavio]

It seems that my dropbox is stable now. I saw some posts about the problems of having symlinks and also about problems when there are too many files (more than 300k files). So, I removed all symlinks and zipped (and removed) some folders with too many files so that now I have less than 300k files. And now, it is stable for some weeks.

[darfnader]

I suffered the same fate over the past few months. It made Dropbox unusable and I have been scrambling for the past two weeks trying to come up with an alternate solution. I think the only way I can make something work reliably is if I set up syncing in between my home server by presenting the ssh port through the firewall so I can perform SFTP syncs and access the files. There are plenty of file broswer front ends for things like mobile platforms or using it for storing files from cloud hosted services. Of course my computer has to be running, but it's been doing fine for the past 4 years. I guess if it fails it's just time to buy a new machine!

[DOsinga]

Just to add my name to the list. This morning it was syncing 8 files, I changed one more and now it says 490 000 files syncing. It doesn't show any recent changes on the client or on the web site, so I guess what's happening is that it is checking these files as to whether they've changed. Anybody from Dropbox wants to weigh in?

[akokkone]

Opened the computer, almost 800 000 files syncing, wlan connection slowing down. Am I supposed to just wait until it's done? 

[Sanchez]

Hey DOsinga & akokkone, 

A re-indexing is a possibility, but it shouldn’t take long. Performance is effected if you have over 300,000 files, however. 

Can you give me some more detail on your respective cases? Have there been any operating system updates/upgrades recently? Was there anything else that may have changed just prior to this syncing? 

Thanks!

[DOsinga · Accepted solution]

I don't recall any changes to the OS etc. It didn't say re-indexing, it said updating and the number of files kept increasing. After one or two days it was still going like crazy.

I found online somewhere that I should delete filecache.dbx. I did that, restarted dropbox. Now it did re-index all files, but this only took a couple of hours. I've not had a problem since.

I think it would be nice if Dropbox would pay attention to this sort of thing in a more timely fashion for paying customers.

[Sanchez]

Hey DOsinga, 

Thanks for the update. I’m sending this info over to our team. 

Thanks!

[akokkone]

I cannot find such a file, even though my hidden files are visible and I've followed through the paths found with several posts about clearing the cache. "filecache.dbx" doesn't seem to exist on my computer. I did find ".drobox.cache" with four subfolders.

(OS 10.12.4 Macbook, two different db accounts installed)