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johndoe789's avatar
johndoe789
Helpful | Level 5
7 years ago
Solved

Dropbox Stuck at "starting" and "checking for changes"

Hi all,

Since 11th December 2018, my Dropbox application on my mac has syncing issues.

The status on my Dropbox application would either say "Starting" and "Checking for changes" when I restarted it. And it doesn't change even after leaving it alone for over 12 hours.

Sometimes the files will show up as "blue spinning icon" and sometimes it will have a "green tick", but the files are definitely not uploaded (could not see it on the web or my mobile phone).

Also selective sync is not working, it does not update the required folders.

Specifications:

Mac OSX 10.11.6

Dropbox 63.4.107

Size of Dropbox: 18 GB

I have done the following:

1. Reinstall the application (twice)

2. Reduce the number of files synced to be under 300,000

3. Unlinked and linked back my account (twice)

4. Leave it overnight to sync for 12 hours (twice)

I am short of just deleting my entire dropbox files and start over again but my internet is very slow and it will take me weeks to re-download everything.

Anything else I could try?

desktop
Download
sync
  • johndoe789's avatar
    johndoe789
    7 years ago

    Hi Lusil,

    I found out what was wrong, my macbook SSD has been degraded recently (only able to perform 90MB/s write, 700MB/s read). Once I ease off the background tasks, Dropbox was able to start syncing the files.

    I hope that in the future Dropbox app will include a diagnostic tool to show what's exactly is happening. This took me a week to figure out the issue.

  • Lusil's avatar
    Lusil
    Icon for Dropbox Staff rankDropbox Staff
    7 years ago
    Sorry to hear that, johndoe789. 
     
    Initially, I’d recommend checking this article out for a few more suggestions on the matter. Could you also please ensure that you don’t have any symlinks in your Dropbox folder that could affect the performance of the desktop app (check out step 7 of this link for more info)? 
     
    Let me know what you find!
    • johndoe789's avatar
      johndoe789
      Helpful | Level 5
      7 years ago

      Hi Lusil,

      Thank you for your reply. I did perform a symlink search and none turns up.

      I have reduced the number of files in the dropbox again to sub 200k files and lets see how it goes.

      Do you have any idea when the next dropbox update may come out? Maybe a new upgrade could fix it

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