We're making changes to the Community, so you may have received some notifications - thanks for your patience and welcome back. Learn more here.
Forum Discussion
View dropbox sync activity
How do I see what files dropbox is attempting to sync?
Dropbox is consistently the highest CPU consuming app on my mac and I'd like to look at if there are files failing, file permission issues, syncing of any files regularly bc of apps touching them, etc. How many files are getting sync over a period of time, the size of the files, etc. Is there like a file activity log that can be viewed? ... when viewing the "Recents" on dropbox.com it only shows me successful updates (and it's not real-time), not all the micro syncs that are happening in the background. thanks -Noah
Hello, I see there are dropbox log files stored at ~/.dropbox/logs ... but appear in binary format. How does one decode the logs? I'd like to see what files the dropbox client has been syncing.
- Walter
Dropbox Staff
And when it comes to those log files, I'm afraid those files aren't viewable from your end Noah C.2. They're needed by our Support team only on some exceptional cases for troubleshooting purposes.
When it comes to your concern, apart from my colleague Hannah mentioned, have you tried looking at your Dropbox folder when the syncing process takes place?
In that case, you'd be able to tell which files are fully synced or still syncing by their syncing icons.
I hope this helps and please let us know if you have any other questions.Thank you both! The sync history helps. I have ~50,000 files in my dropbox under 1000s of folders, so the only way to see what's happening is looking at some kind of sync log, and the "History" section under the "Sync Queue" worked for that. So what I'm finding is DropBox hasn't sync'd a file in days, but it's still the largest power consumer on my mac by over 4x the next runner up, Google Chrome, which I am using all-day long. Why is this? Why is Dropbox using so much power? Walter Hannah. Is there any way to diagnose or reduce the power consumption?
- HannahHi Noah C.2, thanks for reaching out!
You can always check the syncing status of the Dropbox application by hovering your mouse over the Dropbox icon in your menu bar.
Also, you can check your Sync queue, for some more info.
Let me know if you have any more questions!
