Says its synced but it isnt

I’m trying to sync a folder on dropbox with many nested folders - its pretty large at well over 30GB - not sure how large it is.

I’m on the mac and click sync folder - everything - including sub folders. Then dropbox does its thing and then shows the tick icon - but when I go into the next folder not everything has synced - there are still heaps of .cloud files.

I’m trying to sync everything but struggling - any thoughts? I dont want to have to manually go into every folder and have to check.

Please help - any thoughts?

If you want to download everything instead of using placeholder files (.cloud files let you sync on demand), when you right-click sync, turn off the file size limit. This will sync by downloading everything (no .cloud placeholders).

Does that make sense?

Hi @ben,
It sounds like you may be doing what @peter suggested, but odrive could be hitting some Dropbox exceptions that are stopping the bulk download process you are kicking off.

If you perform the same action, does it make it farther through the structure and then stop again?
If so, can you send over a diagnostic so I can take a look?

Hi Tony - it does get a bit further each time - I do now get error messages that pop up stating that I have reached a limit in regards to requests with dropbox and I need to wait a few minutes before trying to sync again. Not sure what can be done here? LEt me know how to send a diagnostic to you? thanks

Ben

Hi @ben,
The option to send a diagnostic is in the odrive menu. So just click on the odrive icon in the Mac menu bar and select “Send diagnostics”.

ok - just sent one to you - let me know if you need anything else.

Hi @ben,
I took a look and I see you are hitting Dropbox request rate limits. It looks like you may have lots and lots of little files, and, since those requests are coming in fast and furious as you try to download everything, Dropbox starts to reject them.

For your bulk download, hitting these numerous exceptions will abort the action, which is why you are seeing the behavior that you are. We are improving this in our next major revision to try to account for it in a smoother way.

For now, we can try using the CLI to essentially perform a not-so-intelligent “download until done”.

  1. Open a terminal session (type “terminal” in Spotlight search):

  2. Run the following command in the terminal session (copy & paste + Enter):

exec 6>&1;num_procs=4;output="go"; while [ "$output" ]; do output=$(find "$HOME/odrive/Dropbox" -name "*.cloud*" -print0 | xargs -0 -n 1 -P $num_procs python $(ls -d "$HOME/.odrive/bin/"*/ | tail -1)odrive.py sync | tee /dev/fd/6); done

Change “$HOME/odrive/Dropbox” to the folder you are wanting to sync down. It looks like you may have been syncing “$HOME/odrive/Dropbox - MWM”, based on the diagnostic.

Yes, it is an ugly one-liner, but the above command will download everything in the odrive Dropbox folder using 4 concurrent workers. It won’t stop until everything has been downloaded.

HI tony - thanks for this - will this work on a mac or a PC? I’m running a mac - or doesnt it matter?

Hi @ben,
The above is for a Mac :slight_smile:

WOW - ok. I launched the very scary teminal window and put the info you told me to do with changing the path - looks like its working!

I assume if I turn my computer off it will pause and then carry on once opened again? Or do I now need to leave it on for a few days?
Let me know.

Hi @ben,
If you put your system to sleep, it should continue once it wakes again, but you should double-check that. If you shut your computer down you will need to run the script again.