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MikeB1971's avatar
MikeB1971
Explorer | Level 4
5 months ago

Dropbox has stopped syncing from my external drive

Hi Folks, I recently moved Dropbox to a (permanently connected) external drive and so far, it's all worked perfectly. Today, however, I ran a normal backup and when the file was done creating (on...
Desktop
Dropbox Backup
Sync
Windows
Walter's avatar
Walter
Icon for Dropbox Staff rankDropbox Staff

Hi there MikeB1971 - thanks for bringing this to our attention and I'm glad to see that it was sorted after pausing and resuming sync.

 

As for the logs you mentioned, you can check for sync issues in the app's preferences after you click on the Dropbox icon in your system tray. 

 

I hope this helps a tad. 

MikeB1971's avatar
MikeB1971
Explorer | Level 4
5 months ago

Hi Walter,

Thanks for replying. The restart helped once but Dropbox has now permanently stopped syncing from this drive. I can stop/start sync and get one "pass" of syncing files added before the restart, but any files added after I restart syncing are not synced.

This is a real problem, as I do not want files that I can't access if the PC goes down on an internal drive.

I'll see if there is anything that might be causing this, like a USB issue.

As Dropbox has only just started doing this, that seems likely, and other people seem to have no issues with external drives and Dropbox.

 

 

 

  • MikeB1971's avatar
    MikeB1971
    Explorer | Level 4
    4 months ago

    Another update: uninstalling and reinstalling fixed everything, so not really sure what the issue was here. Syncing now working perfectly again.

    • MikeB1971's avatar
      MikeB1971
      Explorer | Level 4
      4 months ago

      Last update: syncing stopped again.

      So... I stop and restart sync.

      Now it works again.

      I mean, OK, I can stop/start when I like, but... not exactly ideal. Funny thing is, it DOES sync from external adds, like if I add a file from Dropbox Web it then shows up perfectly on my external drive. It just does not sync anything I add to the external drive itself once it has finishing syncing.

      Maybe a future update will fix it. Here's hoping.

      As it is, I now need to start/stop sync manually every single day. Time waster!

      Just to confirm current behaviour (presumably introduced by an update, as it used to work):

      1. The desktop Dropbox app now only syncs one "run" on my external drive-hosted Dropbox, i.e. everything new since I last pause/resume sync.
      2. Once it has processed this queue (say 12 files or whatever) it will not sync anything from this external disk, whether I add or delete anything.
      3. If I pause and resume sync it will then process all changes since the last pause/resume.
      4. If I add/delete anything using the web-based Dropbox, it WILL change those things on the external disk.

      This is essentially a bug in the desktop Dropbox, so I will file a bug report (if I can).

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