How to solve the Dropbox filesystem monitoring issue

Once Dropbox throws you an error that reads “Unable to monitor filesystem. Please run: echo 100000 | sudo tee /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches and restart Dropbox to correct the problem.” you’d better adjust settings in a system config file, to keep changes after reboot.

Open system config (as superuser, of course) in your favorite text editor

$ sudo vi /etc/sysctl.conf

add just one line of code to the end of the file:

fs.inotify.max_user_watches = 1048576

save the file (Shift-ZZ, if you are new to Vi), and reboot computer to apply settings and restart Dropbox.

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