Dropbox keeps saying, Downloading 67 files...

[x-yuri]

Hi,

There's  a similar topic, but nothing there works for me. Holding Space doesn't reveal any hidden buttons. I had files owned by root, but I changed the owner to my user (uid 1000) on the "source" laptop, and the problem persists (my uid on both laptops is 1000). There are not many files with spaces, and those that have them, they have them in the middle of a filename. I'm running Arch Linux, dropbox-176.4.5108. The sad thing is, there doesn't seem to be any logs to see what it's doing and what's the problem. I don't even know which files it can't download.

[Hannah]

Hey @x-yuri, since it's been a while since we started working on this and the application has been updated a few times, can you make sure that you're on the latest version of the app?

You can use this page to update it.

[x-yuri]

Hey @Hannah, I've just updated the application to 181.4.5678. Still "Downloading 67 files..."

[Jay]

Hi @x-yuri, if the files are visible on the site, can you try adding a test file to one of those directories to see if this somehow helps them to sync down to the machine?

[x-yuri · Accepted solution]

Solved it by temporarily moving the problem directory out of the Dropbox dir:

* on the target machine: stop the daemon and `mv ~/Dropbox/problem/dir ~`

* on the source machine: `mv ~/Dropbox/problem/dir ~` and wait until it syncs

* on the target machine: start the daemon and wait until it syncs

* `mv ~/dir ~/Dropbox/problem` on the source machine and wait until it syncs on both machines

* now ~/dir can be deleted on the target machine

This is in case you know that the target machine has no newer files.

P.S. As shows this discussion Dropbox desperately needs some kind of a log or a way to find out what's causing problems. The lack of it leads to unproductive discussions of a "what if you do this?" (guessing) kind.