I bought the premium Boxifier yesterday mainly due to need of backing up my photos from an external hard drive to Dropbox. I have now uploaded and synced all my photos to Dropbox without placing any of them on my computer, great!
Now the external hard drive is deattached, but Dropbox still keeps making attempts to sync it. It gives error messages like “Can’t sync”, “access denied”.
Is there a way to tell Dropbox to stop syncing the deattached external hard drive?
Besides this I am already very fund of the Boxifier functionality
Yes, you can use selective sync. I used to do this. However, there’s a serious drawback —
The next time you connect your external drive and re-sync the folder, Dropbox will likely treat it as a completely new folder and re-index everything from scratch. It could take a very long time if you have a large number of files. So I suggest you only do this if you don’t sync your external drive that often, or if your external folder is small.
The way it is right now, when the external drive is disconnected, Dropbox’s access to the external folder is somehow blocked by Boxifier, like a person blindfolded. Dropbox can’t see what’s happened to the folder, so it’s constantly trying to figure out (constantly syncing), and in the mean time, it doesn’t do anything with the folder (not deleting any files on the cloud). The upside is that, the next time you connect your external drive, Dropbox’s blindfold is removed and it instantly recognizes that folder. Indexing can be done much more efficiently this way.
I have no idea what kind of fix the Boxifier team has in mind. It seems difficult.
In that case, using selective sync may not be a good idea if dropbox is constantly trying to sync in the background. It could take up valuable processing speed that the computer need for other purpose, ie, slow down the system.
I have another idea and would like the community to share their feedback on it. After syncing dropbox with the external HD using Boxifier, we then transfer the files to another folder in dropbox. Then we de-link the external HD with dropbox.
I wouldn’t do that because moving the files out of that folder would make them look as being removed and trigger them being deleted from the external drive. Please have a little patience. The solution is almost here.
As many of us, I bought Boxifier due to its ability work with external drives. As we see, at least from 15 of May 2015 this ability makes the whole program dysfunctional.
When the external drive is detached, Boxifier, or actually Dropbox through Boxifier, tries to “index” files on the detached external drive. Since there are thousands of such files (122 839 in my case), these endless attempts don’t leave time to the program to update the files that have been really changed or added in other folders.
So, as I said, the program is rendered totally dysfunctional due to this glitch.
[quote=“Razvan, post:2, topic:212”]
Yes, we have a fix in the works that should fix this problem.
[/quote] That was said on 15th of May 2015.
That was said on 25th of December 2015.
That means one would go for a refund but what to do with Dropbox? Do we have other options to work with external drives? Or since “little patience” worn out most of the yearly Dropbox subscription, it’s better to move over to other cloud services?
Is this Boxifier Fix still in the works, is there an ETA?
Like others I have lot of files on an external drive and when the Boxifier synced external HD is disconnected Dropbox is chewing up 30% of the CPU usage trying to index files it can’t find. It’s killing my battery and system performance.
I just paid for premium so if the fix isn’t imminent then I’ll get a refund.
