Files are infinitely copying themselves

I had two instances where files would copy infinitely itself.

For example, there’s a file name ‘name.jpg’.

And this file would infinitely copy itself, up to a level of ‘name (1) (2) (4) (5).jpg’ such and such.

I had to delete those files and unsync it, but even that was hard because odrive app would still copy that file infintely.

Service: Dropbox
Client: macOS 6149

Hi @lee.jake,
This is certainly odd. odrive doesn’t perform any copy operations, itself, unless it is dealing with a conflict. In a conflict case, though, it will append “(conflict)” to the filename. Was this a conflict scenario?

If you are able to reproduce, can you send over a diagnostic so I can take a look?

It wasn’t a conflict scenario. It would just do it by itself.
I sent over diagnostics, hopefully it will have records of what happened back then…

Hi @lee.jake,
Unfortunately it looks like the event happened too long ago to capture. odrive only keeps a small window of activity for the diagnostic.

Can you take a look at the Dropbox events for those file creations? I am curious what the sequence looks like in terms of Dropbox events. If you can find it, please take a screenshot: https://www.dropbox.com/events

Thanks!

Here it is.

This went on for about ten minutes, and I had to delete about 150 copies of the same file.

@Tony

@Tony

Just started doing it on other file. Just sent diagnostics.

Hi @lee.jake,
I am taking a look at this now. Reading these diagnostics is a little bit like reading tea leaves, so its difficult to make out what is going on, especially since there is a lot of activity on your odrive, and the unicode characters end up being represented in hexidecimal (yuck).

I am noticing that there are several items in waiting that cannot sync up to Dropbox because Dropbox is saying the that file names are too long. If you saw my post in this thread, you may be able to get a better look at this list by using the CLI commands there.

For the files that you find continuing to replicate, is there anything you can see that might be initiating this? For example, does it seem to start happening after a new file is created, modified, renamed, or moved?

I am noticing that there are several items in waiting that cannot sync up to Dropbox because Dropbox is saying the that file names are too long.

Maybe those are because there are too many (x) stuck up in the back.

For the files that you find continuing to replicate, is there anything you can see that might be initiating this? For example, does it seem to start happening after a new file is created, modified, renamed, or moved?

One case was when a team member added a file to shared folder, other instance was when downloading from Dropbox.

Thanks @lee.jake.

Let’s try resolving the waiting items and getting everything settled down as much as possible so we can monitor this strange replication issue without the added noise.

Were you able to run the CLI command on the waiting queue?
python $(ls -d "$HOME/.odrive/bin/"*/ | tail -1)odrive.py status --waiting

That should give you a clear listing of what is stuck in waiting, so you can see exactly which files are having an issue.

I ran it as it was copying the files, and it said “no waiting items.”

Hi @lee.jake,
What does the summary status page say?
python $(ls -d "$HOME/.odrive/bin/"*/ | tail -1)odrive.py status

The diagnostic I was looking at showed about 50 items in waiting.