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I have Dropbox set to start on load. However I'm seeing (in the applet indicator) and via:

dropbox status

That it is constantly just stuck on Starting...

I'm running Ubuntu 14.04 and latest version of Dropbox.

I have tried reinstalling but that didn't help. What else can I try?

Zanna
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Phil Hudson
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5 Answers5

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I ran into this on 20.04 recently and on a whim I decided to start it from the command line to see if it spit anything out:

$> dropbox start

It did - it gave me this:

dropbox Unable to monitor entire Dropbox folder hierarchy. Please run "echo fs.inotify.max_user_watches=100000 | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf; sudo sysctl -p" and restart Dropbox to fix the problem.

Not sure why they can't surface that in the GUI?

In any case - 100000 was not high enough for me - I had to make it 500000 before it worked, but it did work.

eburnside
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This appears to happen when Dropbox has partially synced, but has a lot more data left to sync after the machine has been restated.

Simply leaving the machine running for a long time seemed to sort this.

Phil Hudson
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  • I have the same problem. But in addition, the resident memory usage keeps growing (it's now up to 3.7GB), with the result that eventually the system processes are starved and the machine locks up. So that limits how long I can leave Dropbox running. – Paul A. May 15 '18 at 21:47
  • Indeed, at startup the indexing does not show any progress, it says it's just "starting". At least on my rather old HP laptop, Dropbox takes big time in the CPUs too, like 10% as seen from the Top command, this makes it a big resource eater. – reim Dec 08 '21 at 12:21
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For me unlinking my account from the Dropbox application in Linux and then relinking it again solved the problem pretty quickly.

But beware you might be deleting files that haven't been synced (uploaded) yet. For me my Linux Dropbox is not leading, and only following my main data that is on my Windows computer so no issues for me there.

CodeAdaptor72
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In my case the root cause was the device limit on a free account, I had to remove old ones in the "Devices" section here: https://www.dropbox.com/account/security

suside
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  1. Remove Dropbox/.dropbox_cache.
  2. Optional: remove ~/.dropbox and ~/.dropbox-dist. Note that this will essentially result in a "fresh" install. As long as you relink the same Dropbox path, there will be a ton of reindexing, but no file downloading.
  3. Unlink/relink the Dropbox account.
  4. Run sudo sysctl fs.inotify.max_user_watches=100000. If you have more files than this in your Dropbox, perhaps you may be able to increase it to e.g. 524288.
  5. Start Dropbox.
  6. If after a full reindex, there are a few files perpetually downloading/uploading, navigate to your Dropbox folder and run dropbox-cli filestatus to locate them. Remove those files so Dropbox redownloads them. They are probably corrupted. Check their hashes (e.g. sha256sum filename.txt) and compare them to Dropbox's version. If the hashes differ, your harddisk is slowly being corrupted, and may be prone to failure. Consider getting a new harddisk.

Also: sometimes a bit of patience may be required in between steps. To verify that Dropbox isn't just idle, check the following:

sudo iotop  # (and sort by disk read by pressing the left/right arrow keys)

htop --sort-key=PERCENT_CPU

...one of these should show that Dropbox is doing something.

Mateen Ulhaq
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