I have seen some other people using Box Drive, so here is my addition...
Hi Box,
I have Box Drive (v2.27.221) installed (and Box Edit for what it's worth), on Win10 21H2. I am trying to use Everything search to index the box drive, but it is creating massive log files and spamming notifications because Everything is attempting to touch each of the files. Is there any way to change the logging level to not include INFO? See attached... close to 2GB of logs in two days? When I search one of the Box_Streem logs, literally every entry is INFO...
Thanks,
Vernon.
Hello Vernon,
Thanks for reaching out to Box Premier Services. Happy to help!
I understand that you have a query about Box Drive logs. Let me get in touch with our specialists with your question and will get back to you as soon as I hear from them.
Appreciate your patience!
Best,
Ren
Hello Vernon,
Good day!
After discussing your query to our specialists, it appears that there currently is not a way to to change the logging level to not include INFO from Box Drive logs.
The vast majority of the logs will be of the INFO category - that's the tag for when normal actions are recorded in Box Drive. Those lines are critical to provide context around the ERROR, WARN, or CRITICAL actions.
Could you please let me know if you have further questions?
Best,
Ren
Please see attached for a Box and a Box_Streem log if it is any help with what we're discussing.
Hi Ren,
That makes sense, but it should be possible to turn off. The vast majority of the time those logs aren't important (when things are working correctly). In the event of an error, the software could log the previous info lines relevant to the error, rather than all of them always, or, at the very least, write to the log in bursts instead of at each individual entry so that it doesn't make my C: drive 100% active for an hour at a time.
Another issue I have is Box Drive wanting to spam Notifications about not being able to access a file. After turning the Notifications for it off, it still flashes spastically in the taskbar sometimes and consumes massive system resources. I think the real issue is that Everything search is asking for the information too quickly. I'm not sure if there is a way to limit the query speed, but that is something I could propose to the developer.
Regardless, it seems that the Box Drive filesystem is not capable of handling requests fast enough. I suspect this may be because of the backlog of log data that is waiting to be written to C: drive. It gets so swamped trying to write the log data that it times out for the request.
I do have an SSD drive, but it is not my main drive, and while I have found info about relocating box cache etc, there is nothing about relocating the log files. It is also for a newer version of Box Drive that we don't have yet (we are on Enterprise Branch?) Perhaps I can move the whole AppData\Local\Box folder over to E: drive, and use a Symbolic Link? I would be curious to know if it would be able to keep up after doing that...
One thing I want to make clear... I have never had this issue when we were using a mapped network drive. It's difficult to imagine why the activity that was going through (gigabit) Ethernet would ever be faster than the same activity on my local machine, but here we are...Code: Select all
from Vernon
Hello Vernon,
This is Ronnie from Box Premier Services responding on behalf of my colleague, Ren.
I'm going to loop in our specialists to look after this case for review and follow up. Feel free to respond for any additional information or questions you may have. Thank you.
One of my colleague, a specialist will be here soon!
Regards,
Ronnie
Good Morning, Vernon!
Thank you for reaching out to Box Product Support! I am Julie with our Desktop and Mobile Application Specialist Team.
I apologize for the delay in response. Our queues have been higher than anticipated recently, and we thank you for your patience while we continue to work through this matter.
After getting caught up on the conversation, I see you are experiencing some difficulties with Box Drive spamming "unable to open folder" notifications and resulting in large log files, and I am more than happy to assist with the matter at hand.
To start, I want to thank you for the information you have provided.
To help us better understand why you are experiencing this behavior, would you please provide us with some additional information and further details about the impact this issue is having on your business?
When did the notifications and large logs first start?
Are any other users or machines experience this behavior?
As my colleague previously stated, these logs are critical for investigations when users experience unexpected behaviors within Box Drive. While we can increase the amount of logging to include more verbose logs, we cannot reduce or turn off backend logging for Box Drive.
I have taken a look at the logs you provided, and I can see where the third-party program "Everything" is crawling through the Box Drive directories:Code: Select all
section of log here removed
There are two options we can offer to remediate this behavior.
The first option is to create the "BannedProcessNames" registry key for Box Drive and add Everything64.exe to the value data.
Use the search bar to locate the app "Registry Editor" on your machine
In the pane on the left-side of the window, navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Box/Box
Once inside HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Box/Box, right click inside the right-side pane and, from the context menu, select "New">"Multi-String Value"
Name this new key "BannedProcessNames"
Right-click on the new "BannedProcessNames" key and select "Modify" from the context menu.
You will see a small window pop up to add Value Data. In this window you will add the offending processes and click "OK"
The values are NOT case-sensitive, so any capitalization is just to make it more readable.
Reboot your machine after adding these processes to the new Registry Key so that the changes take effect.
The second option, and generally good practice, is to ensure Box Drive is added to the allowlist for any programs that may scan the Box directories (such as antivirus, indexing and search software, etc.) and exclude the following directories from scans:
C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Box
C:\Users\username\Box
C:\Program Files\Box
Both of these options will prevent the Everything64.exe from scanning the Box Drive directories on your machine, which in turn stops the "unable to open folder" notifications and reduces your logfiles down to a manageable size.
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to reach out and let us know!
Thank you for reaching out to Box Product Support! Please let us know if we can be of further assistance!
Best Regards,
Julie
Hi Julie,
Yes, the issue is intersected with Everything. Everything is an indexing application (https://www.voidtools.com/) with powerful and very fast search results. I use it multiple times a day because our sprawling network drive is poorly organized, and searching in any other way would take ages. I do understand that Box Drive has a search function, and it seems fairly responsive, but it is rudimentary at best. That being said, I do not want to disallow Everything from indexing the Box file directory, because that is literally what I want it to be doing.
I will also say, as before, that I do not have this issue at all when indexing our network drive (before we switched to Box). Everything is able to index 418,000 folders and 1,840,000 files *over a network connection* in a little more than 15 minutes. We haven't even moved the majority of those files over to Box Drive yet and it is already overwhelmed.
The argument that Box Drive absolutely needs to do that logging is weak considering that neither Windows 10 nor Everything make logs to that extent when I am indexing the network drive. It is a choice by Box development to *always* collect massive amounts of log data for the purpose of *occasional* debugging. Many other apps have the ability to turn additional logging *on* when you are having an issue. It is off by default. It is clear from the content of those logs that the vast majority of the data is from normal operation and would not be related to any kind of debugging issue.
The issue is compounded by the Box Drive logs being written to the C: drive, which is an HDD on this computer. With Box Drive trying to write thousands of individual log entries *per second*, the drive is almost immediately overwhelmed. Even having it on an SSD would be taxing, but possibly it would be able to keep up? I plan to try moving the Box Drive logs to the SSD drive installed on this computer and using a Symbolic Link to trick Box Drive into writing there instead. Hopefully that will alleviate the situation a bit.
Thanks,
Vernon.
Howdy Vernon!
Thank you for your response.
I have brought this case up with our Desktop Engineering Team for their insight and to find out if there is any way to remove or reduce Box Drive's backend logging.
I will keep you apprised of their response. If you have any other questions in the mean time, please do not hesitate to reach out and let us know!
Thank you for reaching out to Box Product Support! Please let us know if we can be of further assistance!
Best Regards,
Julie
Thank you. For reference, we have version 2.27.221 which is enterprise track I think? I have seen some other things about moving cache folder locations etc, but they are 2.3+.Code: Select all
from Vernon
Good Morning, Vernon!
Thank you for your patience while we have waited on a response from our Engineering and Product teams.
Our teams have confirmed that there is not a way to reduce the logging levels for Box Drive.
In regards to Everything, they intentionally block this process due to the traversing nature of the program as we do not support the use of Search/Index programs within Box Drive and wish to avoid runaway msyncing.
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to reach out and let us know. Otherwise we can work to close out this case.
Thank you for reaching out to Box Product Support! Please let us know if we can be of further assistance!
Best Regards,
Julie
I will find a way to work around it. Thanks for checking. You can close this ticket, but I'm not going to mark it "Solved".