I have been using caja-dropbox with Ubuntu Mate to synchronize files between my home and office computers for a while now (around a year at least), and only recently noticed a problem (i.e., I am unaware of any changes on my end that could be causing it). The client will only display “Starting,” and is not actually synchronizing any of my files. It will do this for hours, or even days, although it will usually silently crash at some point. At one point I had the other Dropbox client installed, because I used it before I switched over to Mate, but I purged that a while back. After I discovered the synchronization problem, I tried purging the caja-dropbox installation, and even purging all my files locally, and starting with a fresh install. When I do this, the client will connect and download all my files, but then it will either silently crash or I will restart the computer, and the next time it hangs on “Starting” again and does not synchronize the files (I confirmed this by placing a simple text file in one of my directories, which was never uploaded). I have not been able to find any other reports of this issue, and so I am creating a new topic for it. I exported the debug output and can provide that or any other information as needed. Thank you for any help!
Brave AI came back with this.
You are experiencing an issue with caja-dropbox on Ubuntu MATE where the client displays "Starting" but does not synchronize files. This problem can be caused by several factors, and the following solutions have been reported to work in similar situations:
If you are using the Mate desktop, you should try uninstalling
nautilus-dropboxand installingcaja-dropboxinstead.
askubuntuYou can try stopping caja-dropbox, removing the
.dropboxand.dropbox-distfolders, and then reinstalling caja-dropbox.
ubuntu-mate communityAnother approach is to stop caja-dropbox, remove the existing configuration, and then reinstall it.
ubuntu-mate communityIf the issue persists, you might need to check the permissions and ownership of your Dropbox folder and related files using commands like
sudo chownandsudo chmod.
DropboxAdditionally, if you encounter an error message about not being able to monitor the Dropbox folder hierarchy, you can run the following command to increase the inotify watch limit:
echo fs.inotify.max_user_watches=100000 | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf; sudo sysctl -p.
antropy.co.ukIt is also possible that the problem is related to the specific version of Ubuntu MATE you are using, and updating your system or the caja-dropbox package might resolve the issue.
Not sure if any of these will help.
Thank you very much! Gemini had not suggested this issue, but I followed the link your AI provided and did something similar. In short, I had a bunch of symlinks and some keyring files with wonky permissions (as well as a collection of infinitely recursive symlinks I somehow created at some point). After shutting down Dropbox, systematically going through and removing all the files that were throwing up errors with the sudo chattr -R -i command, and then starting Dropbox again, it started synchronizing everything. Now I just need to (shudder ) resolve all the conflicting file versions that are popping up and wait to see if everything continues to work. In case anyone else has this problem, here is a synopsis of what I did to resolve it:
- Stopped the Dropbox client.
- Made sure I am the owner of the folder with full read-write access:
sudo chown -R "$USER" "/home/napoletano/Dropbox" ~/.dropbox - Ran the following command, and went through and removed all the files that threw up errors:
sudo chattr -R -i "/home/napoletano/Dropbox"
(Note that I removed these files both locally and on the Dropbox server.) - Start the Dropbox client again.
Thanks again for the help!
You are welcome. I knew I wasn’t smart enough to know the answer but I have had really good luck with Brave AI when it comes to researching linux issues.