Last Updated on September 28, 2023 by Christopher G Mendla
Carbonite uses green and yellow solid and hollow dots on the icons in Windows Explorer to indicate if the folder/file is backed up, pending or excluded. Some times these dots do not work as intended. This leaves you uncertain as to the status of your backups.
The problem – Missing Carbonite Status Dots
I noticed that the dots were no longer showing. In the image above you can see the green status dots which indicate that Carbonite has backed up that file. If the Carbonite status dots are missing, you are losing a critical indicator that your files are, in fact, being backed up.Â
I found a blog post that indicated that the problem was that other applications such as Dropbox will conflict with the shell overlays from Carbonite
NOTE – This post was originally published in 2015. I am not sure that these registry modifications are still applicable – USE CAUTION
One possibility – Modify the registry
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindows CurrentVersionExplorerShellIconOverlayIdentifiers
and delete the dropbox entries.
WARNING – be VERY careful if you edit the registry. Only do this if you are thoroughly familiar with editing the Windows registry and if you have good backups of the data on your machine. The irony here is that when the status dots are missing, you can’t be sure of your backup status without a detailed examination .
EnhancedStorageShellSharingPrivate
and 6 for Gdrive such a GDriveSharedEditOverlay
I found the same post, but hesitated to mess with the registry. Dropbox was not in registry. Instead, I deleted "get dropbox" which came as bloatware on the computer, and then added an exclusion to windows defender for the carbonite program folders. Not sure which of these did the trick, but dots are, thankfully, back. The dots are really a great feature of carbonite.
I simply deleted Google Drive references in the registry and that did the trick