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Is there a way to pause and resume Dropbox from the command line?

I'm running Dropbox as a normal installation (no Windows Service)

I don't want to KILL or freeze the Dropbox process. I want it to go to 'Suspended' mode like it does when clicking on 'Pause syncing'.

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  • Did you succeed?
    – brcebn
    Commented Jul 6, 2015 at 12:17
  • Perhaps github.com/dropbox/dbxcli is worth a dev investigating to add the feature.
    – rdtsc
    Commented May 23, 2021 at 2:52

3 Answers 3

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It appears that Dropbox on Windows does not offer command line options to pause and resume.

What I found effective is to actually suspend the Dropbox process. One way to do that is to use sysinternals utility pssuspend

Once that's available in the default search path, one can issue commands from the commandline like

pssuspend Dropbox

to suspend the Dropbox process and

pssuspend -r Dropbox

to resume it.

At the beginning I was worried that Dropbox would fail to synchronize files changed while Dropbox process was suspended but it seems that the file-system change notifications are queued up correctly.

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  • 2
    This seemed like a great end around, but it's not working for me on Win10. Dropbox suspends just fine, but resuming it doesn't kick off another sync. Tried with changing files and adding new ones to the folder while suspended and nothing got sync'd.
    – Mordred
    Commented Jan 3, 2018 at 17:47
  • @Mordred Fixed as of 2023, either Dropbox or Microsoft fixed it. New/changed files immediately sync for me upon resume. It's a great way to make Dropbox sync more "atomic", if you're doing a scripted task that churns a folder very aggressively and you don't want Dropbox to waste time syncing until the end. I was searching for a solution and pssuspend was perfect. Commented May 30, 2023 at 21:19
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Why don't you create an outbound rule in the firewall and then turn it on and off in a batch file:

netsh advfirewall firewall set rule name="Dropbox" new enable=yes

and

netsh advfirewall firewall set rule name="Dropbox" new enable=no
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  • 1
    This will cut the Dropbox process' network activity. Unfortunately that won't help. I need the Dropbox process to stop accessing files. Commented May 17, 2018 at 7:44
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At the time being (DropBox for Windows version 3.4.4) there is NO command line available (except for "/home" that opens the dropbox folder). There is a request on dropbox forum to add it, but the company has not added it yet

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