Indexing... (forever)

[jabubin]

Hello!  I moved some video footage to my Dropbox last night, and it's still indexing this morning.  Meanwhile, it's eating up my CPU, my RAM, and it says it's locked up 100% of my disk (when I check task manager).  I checked, and none of the files have inappropriate characters (colon, slash, etc).

The only thing I can think that might pose a problem is that I have started to do some video editing.  I use Videopad, and I believe that it makes some sort of directory to the files that you're working on.  I have Videopad saved on the desktop, *not* in the Dropbox folder, because I read that can cause sync problems; I haven't used it in several days, and definitely not since I uploaded these files, but I thought that might be related...?

I'm on Windows 10; I'm not using more than a small fraction of my quota.  What's going on here?  Thanks in advance!

[atccodex]

Hey @jabubin,

Have you tried reinstalling the Dropbox app? 

[jabubin]

I have not, but as I was putting the files in my dropbox last night, I saw a notification in my system tray to that effect.  It said that I ought to re-install Dropbox in order to fix the Dropbox icon, but when I looked after dinner, the notification seemed to be gone, and the problem it had referred to (the dropbox symbol not displaying properly) seemed not to exist.  I'll try that now!

[jabubin]

An update --- I uninstalled, downloaded the latest version, and reinstalled it; it's back to indexing files.  I think I had about 9000 files in my dropbox; it said "indexing 9000 files," then "indexing 8000 files," and so on, to 5000, and has been hanging out there for the last 25 minutes or so.  

Thanks again!

[atccodex]

I'd let it sit and see if it gets through. If not, maybe there is a file in there it is having issues with.

[jabubin]

Ok.   I took a moment to check file names - I know for some of the footage I had saved it with the following file name style " -name of song- @ -venue- ," and so I went through and renamed all those files to eliminate the @ symbol, just in case that was causing a problem.  Other than improper symbols in the file name, what should I look for that may be causing problems?  

It's basically all pdfs, docs, and images (jpg, png, etc), with a few audio files, and now the footage. 

[jabubin]

I ran dropbox's bad file check, and the pandas said there's no problems with any of the file names.  Still stuck at indexing 5000 files though.  😞

[Jay · Accepted solution]

Hi there, could you check to see which folder is still syncing? Is it a specific folder or filetypes? How large is the file?

[mark3676]

How do you tell which file or folder is synching?  I am running Windows 10 and the status display on the task bar only says "Indexing 2 files", or sometimes "Synching 2 files".   But I don't know how or where it displays which files. 
If I could tell which files it was stuck on, I'm sure I could just delete them, or move them or something. 

[Walter]

Hey @mark3676, thanks for joining the discussion here and sorry to hear you're having issues with syncing. 

I just wanted to mention that you should be able to tell which files haven't fully synced yet, by looking at their syncing icons.  The ones that are still syncing will have a blue icon on them. 

While we're at it, if syncing is stuck at the exact same number of files for a wile now, you could also try  fixing your hardlinks and permissions as outlined here. 

Let us know of any updates, Mark.