Last night I spent a long time with a very helpful guy from
Carbonite's chat service (a major improvement over what they had a few years ago) because I have just installed a new subscription of
Carbonite on my new
Lenovo Z50 Windows 8.1 laptop, and the coloured dots weren't showing. I had also noticed that some of the dots had stopped working on my old
Windows Vista laptop.
It turns out the problem lies with
DropBox. Or
Microsoft. Or something.
Dropbox has a whole bunch of overlay icons that it uses, and these tend to crowd out any other programs, like
Google Drive or
Carbonite. Frankly, I don't care about
Dropbox's little icons, but I do rely on
Carbonite's coloured dots to tell me what files still need to be backed up. So after uninstalling
Dropbox and doing a reboot, the dot problem went away. But I need
Dropbox and Carbonite.
I was reading a
Dropbox helpdesk article "
Why aren't my Dropbox icon overlays appearing correctly?" when I found the answer. There is a Windows registry key called "
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\ CurrentVersion\Explorer\ShellIconOverlayIdentifiers" that stores the details of programs wanting to use Shell Icon Overlays, the technical term for
Carbonite's coloured dots. If you are technically minded and brave, exit from
Dropbox, delete the 8
Dropbox entries in this registry key, and start
Dropbox again. This fixes the problem, at least until
Dropbox updates itself with a new version.
I'm not surprised that the
Carbonite tech support people didn't suggest this, but I'm not entirely sure that "uninstall
Dropbox" is good advice either. But if you don't mind fiddling with your registry keys, you may want to give it a try. It works on
Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8.1 and
Windows Server 2012.
8 comments:
Deleting the registry entries worked perfectly to get the Carbonite colored dots working. Thank you for figuring this one out.
Wow, this worked perfectly, and I did not have to exit DropBox at all. Funny thing is, I never even saw any DropBox overlays in the first place. Thanks!
I tried this and not dots. I haven't rebooted so perhaps that is the problem.
I do have some other entries in that key
EnhancedStorageShell
SharingPrivate
and 6 for Gdrive such a GDriveSharedEditOverlay
Apparently, this was a good tool from Microsoft until companies actually started using it. My main concern is getting the Carbonite dots working.
I don't recall if I rebooted but that's often a good idea once you make registry changes.
I can confirm this fixed the problem on a Windows 10 Pro system today. The machine was originally Windows 8 and was upgraded to 10.
I have been running Carbonite and Dropbox concurrently for a few years, and it has been several months since I went through the Windows 10 upgrade. I've never had a problem until this week when my Carbonite icons simply disappeared. But after deleting the dropbox registry entries as suggested by this blog, they are back after a reboot.
Not sure why the conflict chose now to arise.
That worked perfectly for me too. Couldn't figure out why the dots weren't displayed after reloading Windows 10 on my PC. Thanks!!
FYI, I had to reboot for it to work.
Thanks for this information. Not only was Dropbox conflicting with my Carbonite icons, but so was Microsoft OneDrive, so I had to delete those registry entries too. But once I did that and restarted my Carbonite icons are back.
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