Apologies if this has been asked in multiple forms before, but I can’t find much of anything on my particular issue. I’ve been using Scrivener for Windows (the relatively latest version though it might be a few months behind) with Dropbox for about a year now without issues. I practice good saving/syncing hygiene and I basically use it to go between my PC and an iPad I write on sometimes.
I always make sure to sync before opening any Scrivener files, no matter the platform.
I always wait to shut down/sleep my PC until I see the green checkmark on Dropbox.
I haven’t changed any file names or done anything weird lately.
The only recent change is that I did start working in a new project a few days ago, but that project has synced without issue before, as I made it last year before I ever really wrote in it.
Now, however, Dropbox is refusing to sync my files, and I’m a little terrified to mess with much of anything given how finnicky I’ve been told Scrivener and syncing is. It says:
Indexing 27 files…
Uploading “ui.ini.lock”…
No idea what the UI file is, but it’s been hours and I’ve seen no progress. I’ve tried:
Turning Dropbox off and on.
Pausing the sync and resuming it.
Neither of these have changed anything, and I’m afraid to tweak much else. I don’t think I’m even running the most recent version of Dropbox since I have an aversion to updates when they come to file integrity. Anyway, any suggestions or solutions? Really worried about messing with it and hoped I could find some help here. Thank you for your time.
After messing around with this some more and taking out the troublesome file (fortunately this is a relatively new one and I’ve written very little on it), I’ve discovered that a totally unrelated file ALSO hangs on the * Uploading “ui.ini.lock”… portion.
This seems to me like a bug of some sort? Can any of the devs tell me what that file is responsible for? Maybe a setting tweak might help get Dropbox moving again.
Is Scrivener running while you’re doing this? The ui.ini.lock file is part of how Scrivener tells if a project is open, so it will be one of the first files opened and one of the last ones closed. If Scrivener is closed, it’s safe to delete it manually, but it will recreate itself whenever the program starts.
From Dropbox’s point of view, it should be just a text (well, XML) file with a funny extension.
Scrivener was running, yes. I’ve never had a problem with Dropbox syncing while Scrivener was running before, so this was a new issue. Fortunately after I closed Scrivener it synced just fine. I was so worried about losing my work that I didn’t want to do it initially. Thank you for the help!
Lately I have been getting a Dropbox message when I open my Scrivener 3 project: “Remove ui.ini.lock from your Dropbox account and all documents?” I know that this file is the file that tells Scrivener that a project is open so it doesn’t get opened twice, but I don’t know whether to tell Dropbox not to tell me this again or whether I should tell it to delete it from all accounts or move it out of Dropbox. Do you know which one I should pick that won’t mess up my project?
Dropbox knowledge base tells me that files that have been moved out of Dropbox get this message, but I have not moved it out of Dropbox.
If you can give me any info on this file, I would appreciate it. What do you think? Ignore, delete, or move out of Dropbox? So far I’ve just cancelled the message.
Thank you for your time.
I’ve merged your query with an existing discussion on the topic. It probably has to do with the project being open, and this file being protected by the software so other programs can’t mess with it.
That isn’t normally a problem, otherwise every Windows+Dropbox user would be writing in about it. My guess is that it’s a rare timing bug. I don’t think this .lock file exists for very long, probably during the moment of writing to the file, and maybe if Dropbox kicks in right at that moment, fails, and then the failure gets stuck. I don’t know though, that’s speculation as to why it is rare.
There is another lock file that is always present while the project is open, called ‘user.lock’, but that is for an entirely different purpose. It is a simple text file that has your computer info written to it, so that if you try to open the project a second time on another machine, you get a warning. That shouldn’t mess up Dropbox at all, and in fact its existence is primarily for sync users (though it would benefit local file sharing as well).