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Forum Discussion
Files not syncing on a Dropbox folder on a server
Hello all,
Two or three weaks ago dropbox decided to remove symlinks, and we have to move all our files to a new 4TB disk that is mounted on our main server (Ubuntu System). We follow the protocol ...
Hello again,
Thank you all for your answers.
It seems i needed to increase my 'inotify.max_user_watches'. It syncing very slow, but its syncing. We will adopt measures to reduce the number of files in our Dropbox folders, since this is not advicable and it even can crash our system.
I will marked this as solved for now. Thank you all again for the support.
Jay
Dropbox Staff
Dropbox StaffHi Mecalbi, thanks for posting!
To try to get to the bottom of this, let's first discuss the number of files.
As you mentioned you have over 500k files (perhaps double), this could indicate an issue since if there are more than 300,000 files syncing, the Dropbox desktop application performance decreases.
It also depends on how people are accessing the files on the server. Are you remotely logging into the server to add and work on files, or are folders shared to individual accounts from there?
Are you instead sharing the entire Dropbox folder over your network?
Any info you can provide on how the company syncs files to the server would help me greatly!
Hello,
Thanks for the answer. Yes, we are using our dropbox folders into network shares. That can be a problem? There´s any workaround? Thanks.
[Forget to mention] ... We are using Samba File Sharing to create our shares into the network. Each person has a user, but all files are being forced to stay with 0777 permissions and with 'user' owner, same user where Dropbox service / application is running. Then we create symbolic links outside the dropbox folder pointing to the original location of Dropbox, and use the same symbolic links on the samba shares path. Still, we do not use symbolic links inside Dropbox Folder.
Cheers.
- Jay
Yes, that would be an issue, since network file systems do not send messages when files change, meaning the Dropbox app won’t know that it needs to sync anything yet.
There isn’t any workaround for this, as it’s to do with the whole structure of the way networks share and transfer files.
You’d need to either have users remotely login to the one account on the server, which isn’t recommended since it can result in conflicted copies, or have multiple Dropbox accounts with shared folders to the server account.
Symlinks into the Dropbox folder likewise would fail since the computers are sharing it over the network.
However, given the apparent size of the account, they’d need more than that 2 GB of quota given with free accounts, so either paid personal or Business accounts would be better placed for your needs.
Also its happening with the larger files. They are never synced with my machine.
- Jay
Jay wrote:Yes, that would be an issue, since network file systems do not send messages when files change, meaning the Dropbox app won’t know that it needs to sync anything yet.
There isn’t any workaround for this, as it’s to do with the whole structure of the way networks share and transfer files.
You’d need to either have users remotely login to the one account on the server, which isn’t recommended since it can result in conflicted copies, or have multiple Dropbox accounts with shared folders to the server account.
Symlinks into the Dropbox folder likewise would fail since the computers are sharing it over the network.
However, given the apparent size of the account, they’d need more than that 2 GB of quota given with free accounts, so either paid personal or Business accounts would be better placed for your needs.
Having the Dropbox application on the Server is fine, the File Change Notification will go off when any network user changes a file via the shares, the FCN goes off for the truepath and the servers dropbox application is watchig the truepath.
The cause of his non stop syncing is the updated app has faults in the reindex routine.
I suggest he does the following.
Unlink the app, rename the dropbox folder dropOLD, relink the dropbox app, using cloud only files, sync them all up, they take near no space so will fit on the drive next to the real files in DropOLD, once synced, turn off the application, and move the content of the dropOLD folder into the created Dropbox folder, restart the app. DB will see all the moved in files as changed, then check the content is the same as the index keys find they are the same and come up to sync.
*** I have just last week completed this, on our 750k file set ***
Warning : Suggest you isolate all 4TB+ files and delay adding them untill all other files are reindex and sync is completed again, then only move 3 at a time in. The app appears to also have a fault when it is reindexing 4 >4TB files at once causing a endless syncing loop.
Hello again,
Thank you all for your answers.
It seems i needed to increase my 'inotify.max_user_watches'. It syncing very slow, but its syncing. We will adopt measures to reduce the number of files in our Dropbox folders, since this is not advicable and it even can crash our system.
I will marked this as solved for now. Thank you all again for the support.
