Dropbox Indexing / Update corrupting my Boot Drive

Software
1

The past 2 years the macOS experience with drobox has been awful.

I have about 1TB of data kept Online Only. My Dropbox app said I needed to Upgrade to the new App which I did. For the last several days it has been “Indexing” the files which I think is moving the /Dropbox/ Forlder to ~/Library/CloudStorage/Dropbox.

The progress bar moves but slowly and it will go from saying “5 minutes remaining to 5 hours remaining, back to 1 hour remaining”

But the issue I am having is it seems to be killing my NVME Boot drive because after about an hour or so after I start my Mac up, I can’t save any files, if I try and save a Word Doc the Application will not respond, Save an edit in Preview, Preview stops responding. Finder become unresponsive if I try and drag a file to the desktop.

When I boot into Recovery mode I run First Aid on the boot drive and after a restart, everything works again saving and such but the drobox indexing will start again and after an hour I am back to an unusable computer.

I have uninstalled Dropbox for now to make sure that is the true culprit.

I have several backups of my boot drive but I really just want to use the computer.

Should a clean reinstall of Dropbox work? Will that just start from the beginning with the new file location and skip that indexing step?

2

Reinstalling Dropbox is something you can try. The time it needs for indexing depends on the number of files. For example, my coding folder take longer to index because it contains a large number of (small) files.

I don’t use Dropbox anymore, but in the past it had an option that you could select which folders to sync. You can try and reinstall Dropbox and only sync 1 or 2 folders with not too many items.

I hope you also have an offline backup.

3

That’s an awful lot. A lot. Just moving the data across the internet is going to take some time, regardless of the status of your machine … Probably best to get in contact with Dropbox Support.