What's this Dropbox exclamation mark?
Q
I’ve used Dropbox for several years, mostly without bother. Recently, though, the little Dropbox icon in my Notification Area has developed a red exclamation mark. Obviously, this suggests a problem but, weirdly, I don’t seem to be experiencing any hiccups. All my files are synced as expected and if I hover my mouse pointer over the icon it even shows the message ‘Up to date’ – which indeed everything seems to be. I’ve looked through the settings but can’t find anything about this. The red mark has been there for a few weeks now. Any ideas? Mark Wyatt
A
What you’re seeing is almost certainly not a red exclamation mark, but the number one in a red circle – but the Dropbox icon in the notification area is so small it can be hard to see this detail. We say this because Dropbox doesn’t use red exclamation marks at all, as detailed on the company’s page about its sync icons ( www.snipca.com/38910, see screenshot 1 ).
However, what you will see on this icon from time to time are little badges to indicate notifications. If you use Dropbox only in a personal capacity, rarely if ever sharing files, then the quantity of these will be essentially zero. However, Dropbox itself does occasionally send alerts about new features and so forth. These badges are coloured red and a red badge with the number ‘1’, when it appears as a small notification area icon, looks very much like an exclamation mark.
If you click this icon and then choose the Notifications tab, you’ll probably see an ‘unread’ notification. Read it, and then click the Close link. That will make the red badge disappear.
That’s your immediate confusion and problem fixed, but if you want to prevent or at least manage future notifications, read on.
First, right-click the Dropbox icon and then, in the pop-up pane, click the down arrow next to your initials and then choose Preferences. Next, on the Preferences menu, click to select the Notifications tab. Here, you’ll find a bunch of tick boxes relating to a variety of different notification types. You can clear or leave these ticked as desired, but they’re unlikely to be the ones responsible for causing your concern.
For those, you’ll need to visit the relevant settings page on the Dropbox website. You can do this directly from the Preferences menu by clicking the ‘View more settings on Dropbox.com’ link 2 , or by visiting www.snipca. com/38911. Again, there are a whole bunch of pre-ticked boxes to manage here. It’s up to you which you keep or deny but, to prevent red badges that are likely to be unwanted, we’d advise clearing some or all of those listed until the News heading 3 . These are likely to be relevant to anything you’re doing with or need to know about your Dropbox account.