I’ve recently started having trouble syncing my projects to Dropbox on my Mac Mini (M1) that is running MacOS Monterey (12.3).
When the sync routine starts up, it identifies how many files need to be synced, starts the process, and then gets stuck (e.g., “Syncing 9 out of 80.” The program will hang here for hours and nothing seems to be happening.
But when I check the Dropbox app I see that the changes have been synced!
The only way I can get out of this cul-de-sac is to use Force Quit.
Any idea what’s going on here and how to solve this conundrum?
Is this happening when you hit the File → Sync with Mobile Devices command,File → Sync with External Folder command, or when?
If your files is stored in a Dropbox folder on your computer, when Scrivener saves, it saves to Dropbox, so one way to avoid the hang would be to just save normally and not do a manual sync, which Dropbox should run on its own, anyway. If you use Scrivener on your iOS devices, you’ll just want to sync when you open the app—you can set the app to automatically do this through the Settings app.
You can also try dragging your project file out of Dropbox, letting it download, and then dropping it back into Dropbox to re-sync it, which may work out any sync bugs.
If Scrivener/Dropbox is hanging on regular project close, I’d definitely re-sync by dragging the file out, syncing Dropbox, and then dragging the file back to Dropbox. If the issue persists, we can go from there.
That has to be Scrivener managing the sync and counting documents as it goes. That doesn’t happen with an ordinary close unless, perhaps, an external sync is set to occur automatically when you close.
I edited a few sentences in the Project. I then ran the File → Sync with External Folder command.
Same thing happened. Next, I dragged the .scriv file from the DropBox folder another folder on the internal HD, made few changes, and closed the Project. Same thing happened–got hung up on the Sync
ASIDE: Working in a browser, I directly uploaded the edited .scriv file to DropBox. Somehow I ended uploading a .zip file (the file name was the same), so I unzipped it on DropBox and attempted to open it. Scrivener gave me an error message about a missing backup file or something. Not sure what that was all about.
Finally, I opened the .scriv file in the DropBox directory on the internal HD, turned off the automatic sync to External Folder, made a few edits, saved the file and then closed it. Voilá!
This suggests that there’s something amiss when syncing a Project to the DropBox folder on the internal HD.
Until this gets ironed out, I’ll continue to work with the Project file that’s on the DropBox folder on the internal HD and let DropBox itself handle the sync between my computer and their servers. The automatic sync feature in Scrivener is turned off, but the backups are always made when I close the file.
Yes, there are some known issues with the Sync to External Folder function currently. Also, this function is not necessary to use in order to sync with Dropbox unless you’re specifically using it to work with another application. If your file is saved in the Dropbox application on your computer, it will automatically save and sync there—you don’t have to sync manually from within the Scrivener application.