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Forum Discussion
Error when copying anything from Dropbox (monterey, 2020 m1 MBP)
Whenever I try to copy a folder from the local Dropbox folder to another folder in my Mac, I get this error: "The operation can’t be completed because an unexpected error occurred (error code -8062)...
I encountered this problem also recently, on an older Mac using Monterey (12.6.7). I do not see it on newer Macs with Ventura.
The operation can’t be completed because an unexpected error occurred (error code -8062).
This error message occurs when trying to copy the files and folders that are available offline in the Dropbox folder (which is now username/Library/CloudStorage/Dropbox).
I have about 170 folders in that Dropbox folder and the error occurs on only some of the folders. After some experimentation, I could trace the error to specific files, several files that seem odd with names ending in ".db" for which I don't have or know the app, and some other files with names like "icon?"
Some were very old files that had lost their connection to an app (maybe the app no longer exists) and they show like they are a unix executable. In a few cases the file was invisible but seemed to be something that the MacOS creates within a folder, but is not a file that a user would actually use.
When I deleted all these "problem files" (which I have no use for anyway) the complete copy of the Dropbox folder contents (30 GB) succeeded.
I think there may be several contributing causes to this problem, not all of which may be entirely Dropbox's fault:
(1) I had copied wholesale entire folders from my Mac to Dropbox for safekeeping. Apparently some of these folders have hidden files created by the MacOS that interfere with normal copying out later on. This seems to be a MacOS oddity but I would hope Dropbox could have coped with it. One ought to be able to copy entire folders to Dropbox without worrying about what is inside them, hidden or not hidden.
(2) My Mac running Monterey had the problem but the laptop running Ventura did not have it. So this seems related at least in part to differences in different versions of the MacOS.
(3) Once I inspected the problem files, I could see that some of them had never synched, they had ! notations. This seems to be due to some flaw in Dropbox maybe?
(4) The MacOS is unforgiving because when one of these problem files was encountered, it stops the entire copying process so all subsequent copies are not completed due to one problem file encounters early on.
What I have learned: the latest version of the MacOS does not seem to have this issue. As for the earlier versions where I am also using Dropbox, I am now careful about copying entire folders wholesale especially where there are very old files/folders nested.
I think both the MacOS and Dropbox share the blame for some of this. However I can see how it can be hard for Dropbox to maintain compatibility with many versions of the MacOS, especially as the handling of these files seems different, at least under Monterey versus Ventura.
