We periodically get help requests for people working with systems like Dropbox or Box or One Drive or Google Drive etc. and today I got a request for help where a user is using Box with TBC and they have all of their default File Locations pathed to a Box based sync folder on their computer - when TBC starts up it says “File Not Found” and we are trying to assist the user to work out Which File is not found
As you can imagine - looking for a file that you know exists when you know its name is hard enough, but looking for a file that does not exist or is in the wrong place and cannot be found by TBC when you don’t know its name or location has to be worse than looking for a needle in a haystack …
Anyhow - the suggestions I have made include the following
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In Support - Options there are two sections where you can define files / folder paths - you probably need to start by setting all those to defaults and checking that TBC starts up OK. Once you have done that I would set each path one at a time and restart TBC to see if the message comes up. When you find the setting that triggers the problem then I would go to the default path location and copy the contents of the folder to your Box Folder location and then path the Options to that location so all the files it normally finds can be found and see if that solves the issue.
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Repeat the above process for all Path locations and see if any others trigger the same issue.
If you find the issue please post a response here so others may learn from the post if needed.
If you find the issue and make a copy of the files in your Box location and the problem persists - let us know so we can dig a little deeper with Trimble as needed.
I will say that we have had some issues with products like Dropbox and Box and One Drive etc. that they are watching the sync folder all the time and if they see changes to a file as it gets addressed / opened by an application like TBC, they put locks on the file so that they can sync the changes to the server - this can mean that the file that TBC requires cannot be accessed in read / Write mode which is needed for use in TBC and as a result TBC does not work correctly because of these systems. The only way to fix that is to pause the sync function of the file management system so that the locks are not put on files used by TBC while TBC is in use.
We have found that Microsoft and Google systems typically seem to manage this better than systems like Dropbox and Box - I guess because they are the operating system providers -they may know how to do that best and as a result generally give a better result while maybe not being the best overall solution for centralized file management and sharing.
If you want to troubleshoot what TBC is doing Microsoft has a utility called Process manager that allows you to see what processes are in use and also which files a process has open - the video below shows how to review that for TBC - maybe this will help also - although if the file cannot be found I am not sure that it will show up in the file list to see what is open - however if you run it with TBC using default settings and report all the files it is opening and then change the paths to your Box location and then run it again, you may be able to see which files are opened in the default setup vs those that are opened in the Box Setup and see the differences and troubleshoot from there.
The Microsoft Process Explorer link is as follows
Process Explorer - Windows Sysinternals | Microsoft Docs
I hope that this helps - it would also be great if Trimble would put up the name of the file it cannot find as that would help a lot to troubleshoot this more directly.
Alan