Error Message 'Unable to open folder'
I recently installed box drive on a new device, and after a few hours of normal use, I've been getting bombarded with a strange error message 'unable to open folder' for many folders i have tried opening (though certainly exist within our shared documents).
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Official comment
This issue is the result of softwares that scan the Box Drive location to inspect its file contents. This causes each of these files to be downloaded by Drive in succession. This is a limitation that is not able to be worked around by Drive, as when the operating system requests a file from Drive, Drive must try to deliver it. The notifications represent the volume of requests that are failing due to excessive download requests.
The solution to this issue is to exclude Box Drive from whichever software is scanning the Drive folder. As noted this is a security concern for some customers, but in practice all files that will be uploaded via Box Drive will be coming from a location that is already being scanned by this software, and should already be safe. Additionally, Box scans all files for malicious content on upload.
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Hi Nat,
Welcome to the Box Community!This would be something our Box Support team would like to investigate with you and may require specific account information.I've gone ahead and created a ticket for you so that an agent can work directly with you on looking into this.Please check your email for details.Thanks for your patience!Best, -
This began happening to me as well last week and is getting progressively worse!!! It's crippling my ability to work. Uninstall/Re-Install on Mac OS didn't solve the problem. Happening to a couple of other people in our organization as well.
Has any progress been made on this?
Device info:
Macbook Pro (2019)
MacOS Catalina (10.15.7)
2.3 GHz 8-Core intel Core i9
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The response I received is below. I haven't had the user test this as it would seriously impact his productivity, so can't confirm whether this resolved our issue yet.
After taking a look at the logs, it appears that processes called "Adobe Media Encoder 2021" and "Adobe Premiere Pro 2021" are making a large number of requests on the files in your Box Drive folder.
When applications try to open files throughout all of Box, Box Drive must fetch lists of file names in every Box folder from Box.com that the user has access to. To preserve fast and reliable service for other Box users, Box.com will often reject excessive traffic like this from Box Drive, forcing Drive to slow down (i.e. rate limiting). It appears that most of the Drive popup notifications this user got were to tell the user of transient failures due to these rejections from Box.com.
As a test, can you try uninstalling these programs temporarily and see if the issue still persists? You may also want to reach out to Adobe to receive guidance on how to allow-list the necessary Box Drive folders in their programs so they aren't continually scanned:-
C:\Users\username\AppData\
Local\Box\Box -
C:\Users\username\Box
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C:\Program Files\Box\Box
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Hi Everyone,
I'm so sorry to hear that you've encountered this issue with Box Drive.
To further look into this, can you please share you use cases to our support team by submitting your tickets here: https://support.box.com/hc/en-us/requests/new
This might require some account specific information and you may need to submit your Box Drive logs for the team to investigate what could be causing this from your devices.
Thanks for your patience and please come back and let us know how it goes with support.
Best,
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Update from Box: We have discovered that Apple's Finder extension is making excess calls to Box file systems, and our engineers are working alongside Apple to uncover why this is now affecting multiple customers. While I do not have an ETA on a fix for this, I will hold onto this ticket and update with further information as soon as Apple has provided more updates.
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The new version of Box Drive for MacOS did not fix the problem.
Other symptoms that I noticed are:
1) Ping and trace route times for www.box.com are excessive when compare with other cloud drive services for example:
googledrive and dropbox ping times are 9-10 ms with 0% packet loss
box ping times are 70 to 300 ms with 0 to 30% packet loss2) My team notice that file upload and download speeds are faster when processing through the web interface vs. using the Box App.
3) Longer ping times and packet loss correlates to UI error and significant loss of computer performance. I see no performance losses when I quit the box app.
Is anyone else see these problems? I suspect if it is related to a inadequate sync algorithm in the box app.
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