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Forum Discussion
Dropbox Backup skipped some files on external drive, MacOS permissions?
I added an external drive to Dropbox Backup a couple of days ago; it was large and took about 16 hours. Seemed to have worked fine, but this morning I was comparing the backup files with my drive and...
Jay
Dropbox Staff
Dropbox StaffHi utpmg, what is the current status of the backup when viewing it on the Dropbox site?
Just says "Done" with a checkmark, 1:45 pm local today
- Jay
Thanks for the info, I'd recommend contacting the support team directly for them to investigate this matter in more detail on their end.
Ok thanks.
Support still hasn't found a solution but I have. Looks like this is indeed related to permissions and other Mac OS file attributes. I opened one of the files (they're all photos) that wasn't getting backed up in Preview; weirdly it said it was "locked" although "Get Info" indicates it is NOT locked. I ran (in Terminal) ls -al and noticed the succesful directories had an "@" in the final security bit, the failed ones had a "+". Apparently this + means "ACL" which affects permissions which can override standard permissions. (Possibly because these are so old.) So I ran "chmod -RN" on the problem directories and this "unlocked" them and they were picked up by Dropbox Backup on the next run.
THe most annoying aspect of this is how it fails silently, even though the Dropbox Backup app *knows* it's failing; Once during a backup I put my mouse over the Dropbox icon in the menu bar and saw, very briefly, a message "Indexing "Samsung...os.dbx-external-drive" "Can't update "198503_05" yet it disappeared, the files were skipped, and Dropbox backup status was normal.
