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Solved
Won't stop indexing on Mac
I installed the mac dropbox update and the application began indexing my files. It has now been stuck for the last few days. I can only access some files. Many are now only available through dropbox.com and not in my app. If I add files to dropbox.com they are added to the indexing queue of the desktop app, but no progress is made regarding indexing. I've tried signing out, quitting, uninstalling, and reinstalling. I've seen similar threads, but no solutions have worked for me. Any help is much appreciated.
Hi Everyone,
Thanks for your patience while we investigated. We have confirmed that the problem with resyncing has been resolved with macOS Sonoma 14.1. Users should not experience a resync when upgrading to 14.1.
Upgrading to 14.1 will prevent resyncing, but it will not resolve this issue for users who have already become 'stuck' on the resync upon upgrading to 14.0. We can help, but we're asking that users contact support for individual assistance.
Regards,
Ben
Dropbox is stuck at "indexing" for weeks on my Mac (macOS Sonoma 14.0). Tried quitting/restarting dropbox, tried to pause indexing for a while. None of that worked.
- Hannah
Dropbox Staff
Hey kurtrichard, I moved your post to this relevant thread, so you can take a look at Ben's solution here.
Hi Hannah
Thanks, but has no solution. In that thread he only writes that want should contact dropbox and ask for individual advice.
Since I updated my mac to Somona 14.1.1, Dropbox stopped working and is stuck syncing forever.
What I have done:
1. Restart Dropbox and Macbook, didn't work.
2. Reinstall Dropbox, didn't work.
3. Make sure Dropbox app has full disk access, still didn't work.
Any idea how to solve this?
I've been following this thread for weeks now (as I'm in the same boat). I'm really not excited about having to reformat and re-install MacOS from scratch. I'm hoping someone from DB support will contact me. Best part is I opened a ticket on Sunday night. Their response (Monday afternoon US Mountain time) was that someone else would contact me to help sort it out. Here I am 2 days after I open a ticket and no real response from DB. I'm really surprised they are handling the support of this as badly as they are. I really hope to hear from someone to sort this out.
effinsyv I experienced the same lack of support, as did many others.
I have been a loyal customer for over 11 years and I thought perhaps I would be given a few months free subscription, or some additional storage space for all the inconvenience. I didn't even receive a message with any clear acknowledgement of the problem.
Ultimately, I had to spend a lot of time working it out myself with pieces of information gained here from others experiencing the problem and my own abilities.
All I will say is that Microsoft One Drive and Google Drive are worth considering. They had no problems with macOS Ventura and Sonoma and the upgrade to File Provider, have most of the functions that Dropbox has, appear to be rock-solid, plus are less expensive.
- I’ve been thinking about this actually as well. I have the free tier for google drive and it’s been working nicely. I also have OneDrive with my work and I kind of hate its integration (especially remote when I’m on my phone or iPad). DB has always played well with Mac and better than the others in my opinion. It might be time to think about a wholesale change at my next renewal (sadly next year). We have the family account and a lot of data between my wife and I to move to another service- which will be annoying but maybe better if they continue to work.
Thanks for the input. Really hoping they get their stuff together.
So I've been running overnight and everything appears to be working.
My Question now is, What if I don't bother "upgrading" to File Provider. Is that a problem? Is there any real benefit to it other than having my dropbox files in the cloudstorage folder?
I'd love to hear some feedback from users or DB staff as to why I need to update (since it works now).
effinsyv my advice is to upgrade to File Provider, its the new system required by Apple, if you stay on the old non-File Provider, it won't be supported and things will probably start breaking with new software upgrades on MacOS and Dropbox.
Konigi I can understand your decision, we have all learnt a lot about how unvalued we are as customers here 😉
- That’s what I was afraid of. Guess I’ll give it a shot this weekend.
Hi all,
I just wanted to close this up my experience with the dropbox debacle. As mentioned in previous replies, I was able to get DB working. I successfully did the file provider update. That was pretty much a non-issue once I blew the whole thing away and started over. The last step in the saga was to redo the DB Backups that I had, which was an external drive and my Mac Doc/Desktop Folders. The Mac HD folder was quick and easy and the External was successful as well, although it took all weekend to get it uploaded.
My suggestion is to baby step through everything and make sure you have enough time to sync up before unplugging or disconnecting from the internet, just to eliminate a variable. Good luck out there!
Well, I'm back- either a Sonoma update or DB update broke it again. No other changes- still 1000 files waiting to index. I'm at a loss as to why I have to spend so much time trying to make this work. Strange thing is my files seem to be syncing without a problem, but there are always about 1000 files syncing. Does anyone know if DB saves a log of the files that are stuck in perpetual sync? If so (and I can access it), maybe I can figure out what's going on. I'm wondering if it's a permission thing with one of my folders? If I knew what was not syncing, I could probably sort it out.
- Walter
