I have been using Dropbox to keep my 4 Macs in sync for many years and I’ve never run into problems until about 3 weeks ago. At that point 2 of my Macs started showing a new message within Dropbox that said “Performing a one-time update”, followed by a “Syncing” message that continued on for 2 weeks… It looked like it was never going to finish syncing, so in the end I completely purged Dropbox from the affected machines (including all of the various library and preference files that are scattered behind the scenes). I downloaded Dropbox again, reinstalled it, downloaded all of my files from the Cloud and it started working again.
However, I have continued to notice that Dropbox now hates RW files. I used to be able to drag a RW file into Dropbox and it would sync quickly and easily - but now it takes forever. Sometimes it literally takes all night. It appears to me that Dropbox has done something to change the way it syncs files and it no longer processes RW sandwich files efficiently at all.
I wrote a very nice and friendly reply to my Dropbox support person (4th one). In this 6th or 7th email to them I explained that Dropbox did NOT seem to handle RW files well, that it started suddenly, that dropbox had worked perfectly for me for years. But something now was not working with RW sandwich files.
The reply from Dropbox was that they could not fix anything wrong with RW files, that was an issue with RW. I thought that odd since they are in the file backup/sync business and need to handle all types of files in order for the product to perform as advertised. But the support person (supposedly a “higher” support person) was not at all interested in what I had to say.
I continue to use Dropbox now without problems, heavy use of selective sync and smart sync, but Rapidweaver files get zipped before I put them in Dropbox. All my project files (about 2000 pages total in ten projects) are in one folder. That folder gets zipped at the end of the day. I then have Carbon Copy Cloner keep a Sun thur Sat seven day backup by cloning my RW zipped folder to the proper day folder in dropbox.
Thanks for the recommendation regarding the use of zipped files - I’ll give that a try.
I’ve basically found in the last few weeks that Dropbox works perfectly well with all of my common file types - except for RW files. As I mentioned, this is a new development for me personally, as I’ve never had issues before. But I may have to rely upon zipping them up before uploading.
@1611mac We’re running Dropbox in my office to keep our RW files synched so anyone can grab a client’s project and make updates or changes to it. It has worked pretty good for quite a while. I have experienced Dropbox hanging up over the last few weeks. Maybe the only difference is we use two different Dropbox accounts and synch a “Team” folder between us.
The (temp) solution to this is to go to the Dropbox app, when it drops down, click Account > Preferences. In that Preference panel, click Account. Then hit your Option button on the Mac, you will see the “Unlink Dropbox” button disappear and two buttons appear “Fix Permissions” and “Fix Hardlinks”. Click “Fix Hardlinks” and the app will resynch fairly quickly. We have 10’s of thousands of files (over 100 RW projects) and it synchs in a matter of minutes.
It seems like we’re doing this on a regular basis now to synch our files, but it works. Good luck.
FWIW: I believe Dropbox among other cloud storage providers might be taking on a space-saving technique originally derived from data backup systems called “de-duplication” which is a way of only tranferring identical data blocks only once (instead of multiple times) thus saving space in their data centers.
In order to find what data to transmit (in this case - to Dropbox) to local (Dropbox) software on your computer must open all files that are to be transferred and go through them looking for indentical pieces of data (on a low level).
If this operation is to be done over several thousands of files it will take a long time since it is your computer that executes all these operations before transmitting it to the (Dropbox) cloud.
Bandwidth is not an issue here, but the problem lies in the time to perform de-duplication which grows exponential with the number of files involved. I don’t know if this is the problem in this case but given the answer from Dropbox’s support team regarding the huge number of files I suspect thast this has some thing to do with the problems experienced.
And all the while Dropbox tries to get me to “upgrade” to more storage space, as if my 2TB doesn’t give me enough headache (and I use only 800gb of the 2TB!).
If you guys just are trying to sync RW and development stuff between your own computers (as opposed to sharing with clients or mistakenly using Dropbox as your backup) I highly recommend using Resilio Sync Pro https://www.resilio.com/individuals/ or their Team/Enterprise solutions depending on your needs.
Syncing works like a charm and if you’re on a Synology NAS there is a plugin for those. I use it when travelling on photo tours etc to sync back my photos to my NAS and mail computer at the home office so everything already is there when I get home to work.
I have heard that Resilio has improved a lot. I used it early on and had massive data loss with it. It would not work well with Mac package file format. I have been wanting to try it again. I just got punched too hard from it early on…
We moved to synch.com and now do daily backups with an external hard drive. There are two of us in the office and have been satisfied with moving from Dropbox.
Only issue we found was that we could not name files that ended in a period. (AB Tools, Inc. ) or name a page that ended in a period (River Wheel Co.). Those files would not upload, but changing the names uploaded them without corrupting the files.