Dropbox isn't running/is already running

Question

whenever I start my computer, dropbox does not automatically start itself aswell. Furthermore, when I try to start it using the program launcher, nothing happens. I then tried the command line (dropbox status), which gives: Dropbox isn't running!

Naturally I want to start it using the command dropbox start, which returns:

Dropbox isn't running!
Dropbox is already running!

Odd! My current workaround is to delete the .dropbox-dist and .dropbox folders from ~/ and then do dropbox start -i, which starts the installer again and gives me access to my dropbox up to the point at which I have to restart my computer.

Any solution on this?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Found this thread upon running into the same problem on Ubuntu 14.04 (unsure of which dropbox build I'm using). I'm logging in via ssh and after copying some files to the remote ~/Dropbox/ folder, I found that they weren't syncing. That's when I tried to manually start dropbox:

dropbox start

and got the isn't running/is already running message. What seemed to work was checking if there was already a dropbox process:

ps aux | grep dropbox

Found there was indeed, so I killed it and then restarted dropbox:

kill <pid>
dropbox start
dropbox status

Answer 2

You can fix this by installing dropbox using software-center or Type following command in terminal.

sudo apt-get install nautilus-dropbox 

This will integrate nautilus with dropbox. After that you don't need to check and run dropbox manually.