Dropbox spinning but never syncing
Symptom On Ubuntu (e.g. 24.04), Dropbox sits on: Starting... or reports: Unable to monitor entire Dropbox folder hierarchy dropbox status may show it stuck indexing or perpetually “Starting…” despite restarts. Cause Dropbox relies on the Linux kernel’s inotify subsystem to monitor file changes in real time. Each file or directory requires an inotify “watch”. Ubuntu’s default limit is often: fs.inotify.max_user_watches = 65536 Large Dropbox folders (hundreds of thousands of files) exceed this limit. When the watch limit is exhausted, Dropbox cannot monitor the full directory tree and stalls during startup or indexing. This is unrelated to inodes. It is a kernel event-watch limit. Diagnostic Test Check your current limit: cat /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches Check your file count: find ~/Dropbox -type f | wc -l If file count approaches or exceeds the watch limit, that is the problem. You may also see this error explicitly: dropbox status Output example: Unable to monitor ent...