I have a Data partition between OS X Mavericks and Windows 7 Boot Camp. I have my Dropbox folder in the partition. I have tried using it in the past formatted as exFAT. This was unsatisfactory in that it would not stay indexed in OS X, and there were other issues.
I have now formatted the Data partition as Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Then on Windows 7, I have a trial version of Paragon HFS+ for Windows installed.
Here is my issue. OS X creates a bunch of files in Dropbox ending in com.dropbox.attributes. There is at least one of these almost for every file in Dropbox. From OS X these do not sync to the Dropbox server and are hidden. However, in Windows they are visible and sync to the Dropbox server.
I would like to do two things:
- Hide them in Windows 7
- Prevent them from syncing to the Dropbox server in Windows 7
(By the way, I have already tried running a command in Windows that hides all of these files. It only worked temporarily. As soon as Dropbox was back up and running they re-appeared.)
Please let me know if you need any more information or clarification.
Update:
I appreciate the input, Rich. After looking here more closely, I can see how it is pretty much a lost cause without Dropbox's fix for it. By my post I was curious if hiding or making them marked as "system files" would make a difference or to see if there were other ideas. I had tested the possibility of running a bat file on startup that did the following (hide and mark them as a "system file"):
attrib +S +H *.dropbox.attributes /S
I learned quickly that the issue is that Dropbox in conjunction with Windows 7 actually creates the com.dropbox.attributes files and that it is not OS X that creates the files. The extended attributes of OS X cause Windows to create them. So, they get created anew every time Dropbox runs in Windows. I will plan to file a bug report.
It is too bad that partitions between OS X and Windows don't play nice. My Data partition at home between two Linux distros and Windows 7 works beautifully, no such issues. Between OS X and Windows the extended attributes of OS X (in conjunction with Dropbox of course) seems to be the main culprit. This was the case when I tried to use this Data partition formatted as exfat. Who knows, maybe one day all OSs will be compatible with all formatting types and work well together.
Best Answer
There is nothing that you do about this other than try to hide them. It occurs because one file system doesn't support extended attributes.
There have been quite a few posts on the dropbox forum and I suggest you file a bug report with dropbox. They'll claim it is normal behavior but they still need to find a fix.