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Forum Discussion
The Dropbox app is stuck on "starting" on my Linux device running Ubuntu 18.04.
Good evening,
On one of my computers, a Linux computer (Zorin OS 17 Pro based on Ubuntu 18.04), the Dropbox application is stuck on “Start” and therefore no longer synchronizes my dropbox.
Than...
Nancy
Dropbox Staff
Dropbox StaffWelcome aboard the forum, Fennec72! Hope you’re well.
Besides the Dropbox app, do you have any other third-party apps that launch at the same time on your computer?
In general, the Dropbox app needs to perform a quick reindex whenever it's restarted to check if any files have changed since the client was last run. This process may take longer if it collides with other services or apps that also begin to run when your computer initially starts.
If that’s not the case though, I’d like to know the number of files currently syncing locally on your Dropbox app to make sure they're not more than 300k (as this could cause performance issues on the app). You can check this by right-clicking on your local Dropbox folder and going to its properties. Feel free to send me a screenshot of what you see, too.
Let me know what you find.
Thank you for your reply,
Indeed, there are 358,605 items in my Dropbox on my main computer, which is a Mac, which exceeds the 300k you indicate.
Yet I've never had a problem blocking synchronization on the Mac, apart from the fact that at startup, I often need to quit and restart the macOS Dropbox application because, otherwise, it stays on "Startup", but, on macOS, once I've restarted the application, synchronization works just fine, despite my ADSL connection (unfortunately I don't have fiber).
To be more precise about the subject of this discussion, under Linux, to leave the "Startup" stage and for indexing to start, you need to have deleted all the hidden files starting with ".dropbox", such as ".dropbox", ".dropbox-dist" or .dropbox-cache" (perhaps only some of these configuration files really need to be deleted), before restarting the computer and re-associating the computer with the Dropbox account.
However, if I suspend the synchronization a little too long or have to restart the computer, the application gets stuck on "Startup", and this is much more annoying than on macOS, because in this case, restarting the application doesn't help.
To restore synchronization, the only solution I've found is to repeat the process described above: delete the configuration files, restart the computer, reassociate.
Do these additional details help you identify the problem I'm facing?
- Walter
Thanks for the additional details there Fennec72 - much appreciated.
Since there's a large amount of files to be indexed by the app upon startup, this might be normal to some extent. Could you try using the selective sync feature to lessen the app's load and let us know if it helps?
