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Forum Discussion
Solved
Why do these com.dropbox.attributes files show up everywhere?
These files are cluttering up my folders. There seems to be one for every real file that I have. I'd like to delete them.
What are they and where did they come from? And how can I stop them?
Hi,
The issue you're seeing is a Mac issue that occurs when copying files with extended attributes metadata into a file system that doesn't support them.
Depending on the information stored in the metadata, you may or may not need these files.
These files are called AppleDouble files and more information on how to handle them can be found by searching for: "apple double files"
To avoid this issue if you have your Dropbox folder on an external drive, we recommend ensuring that the drive is formatted in the default file system format for the Operating System that is installed.
A quick fix to remove those files: from the website you can search "attributes" in the search bar.
You can select all the results and delete them all together.
Thank you!
Just to flesh this out a little bit... It's fine that the Dropbox system creates the first .com.dropbox.attributes file on the unsupported file system as a way to preserve info. But these extra files should never appear on the Dropbox server. The Dropbox software should use them for read/write purposes on the unsupported FS alone, but they should never appear on the Dropbox server or be propagated to another supported FS (like HFS or NTFS).
Also, Dropbox should give the user an option as to whether he wishes to have this extra file attribute info preserved in such files on the unsupported filesystems or whether to forgo the extra files and sacrifice the loss of that file information everywhere, both on the server and all supported and unsupported filesystems.
