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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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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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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I think we actually do use Nessus too, so that would make sense.
We ended up having to (for the few affected users) exclude Powershell as a "banned process" for Box, for a workaround:
Close Box completely and set the following registry key:- Create the regkey
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Box/Box/BannedProcessNamesand set to aREG_MULTI_SZtype. - Then add the name of the process to the list,
powershell.exe
I also added DBUtilRemovalTool.exe to the list as well, since the affected users were all on Dell Laptops. After a restart and exiting and then signing back in to Box, the error notifications stopped.
No word yet on a more direct fix.
- Create the regkey
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Box Support provided the following explanation: "This is a behavior that we have seen in the past and our Engineering Team has identified that this is caused by 3rd party programs traversing through the filesystem. When scanning files in the Box Drive folder, this triggers a download of any non-cached documents. For users with a large number of files, you'll see high CPU usage, network degradation, and if the download requests exceed a rate limit, you'll start receiving these notifications. Since the software continues to scan, the user gets hit with a bunch of notifications in quick succession."
They recommend creating the "Banned Processes Name" registry key as others have mentioned previously...not the answer I was hoping for :(
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