Windows 10 - Accidentally Clicked Make Available Offline for 700 GB drive.... How to stop sync?

[Travis_JP]

I was trying to access the folder in a new window and stutter clicked on the context menu and clicked "Make Available Offline" for a drive that's 700 GB of design files..  Aside from quitting the app to prevent it from syncing the entire drive and bricking my hard drive to capacity, is there a way to undo this setting?  I'm afraid to restart the app because I don't know if it will continue the syncing process.

Thanks,

T.

[Travis_JP]

UPDATE - there is a function in the context menu to make it online only again.  But it's still going through the process of syncing 100,000 files so Dropbox is basically useless at the moment until it finishes.

[Jay]

Hi @Travis_JP, thanks for bringing this to our attention.

In general, it should stop syncing to make the files online-only again.

Are you still experiencing this issue on your device?

[Travis_JP]

@Jay

Thanks for the response.  I did reset it to online only but it still went through the process of syncing thousands of files in the Dropbox app.  It did not download anything to my computer directly, but I could not stop the process or reset the sync to what I needed.  So I had to wait for the remaining two hours of the day for it to complete it's sync/index process until I could get the correct folders to update.

For example, I needed to access a specific file in one folder, that the designer had updated on his end.  Since Dropbox was stuck in the sync loop, it was not updating the shared folder, so I could not access the file to start my portion of the work.  Instead I just had to wait until the process completed so that everything was removed from my list and I could re-sync the desired folders.   My workplace operates mostly off Dropbox, but most everyone is on Mac OS.  So far Windows OS version of Dropbox is ok, but not being able to force or hard stop the syncing process is something that I wish we could do.

Thanks,

T.

[Jay]

Just for clarification, has the syncing process finished now, and files are updating normally and are online-only?

[Travis_JP]

Jay - yes it took a couple hours but everything is synced correctly now.

[Jay]

Glad to hear it's working now. If you need any further assistance in the future, please let me know.

Enjoy your week ahead!

[Stephen P.32]

Hi Jay- I am also having this issue- I accidentally hit the download/cloud icon in my mac finder- and now it's downloading a massive amount of unwanted files to my computer- it's going to freeze my machine and make DB inoperable for hours.  Is there no way to stop this download in it's tracks?  I have no interest in ALL of the files in that folder being online only- so that isn't a great solution for me either- this was a massive folder containing subfolders and certain things I need immediate access to- and some i wanted stored online.  It's 2 years past this post- has this issue been addressed?  If not, my day is F#$! Thanks

[Megan]

Hi @Stephen P.32, thanks for posting here today!

Have you tried changing the folder back to online-only? Can you give it a go, and let me know how it goes?

In general, we suggest that you allow for the content to sync, and then change them back to how they were, but quitting the app and resuming it might do the trick.

Let me know more, and we'll take it from there!

[Stephen P.32]

Hi Megan- yes and yes- but both of those suggestions create problems:

- changing whole folder to online only negates the custom setup I had to all the subfolders and sub-sub folders within. 

-allowing all to sync first will freeze my computer- as the folder is massive.

I think there should be a way to simply stop the download to the device- this would not need to change any syncing in cloud- simply what is being pushed onto a given device.  We should have full control over that feature- otherwise Dropbox has the capacity to hijack user's device.