OS ERROR 32 & OS ERROR 145 when using Quarto on a Dropbox directory. SOLUTION: Use local folder.

[Thiago-Alckmin]

Bug description

My project is in a Dropbox folder. When I have more than one .qmd file and use the quarto book (though I suspect the issue would persist for any quarto project), the rendering process is incredibly unstable. The intermediate files that appear (e.g. ..\site_libs\bootstrap\) seem to induce conflicts of the type: "The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process.". They cite os error 32 and os error 145 as the issue. The issue has subsided now that I am using a local folder, not Dropbox. I would imagine any web syncable folder (e.g. OneDrive, GoogleDrive, etc) would present this issue. Hopefully someone is able to fix this, as I am sure this poses an issue to a lot of teams' workflow.

Background Info:
R 4.2.2
Windows 11 Pro 22H2

RStudio Info:
2022.12.0 Build 353
© 2009-2022 Posit Software, PBC
"Elsbeth Geranium" Release (7d165dcf, 2022-12-03) for Windows
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) RStudio/2022.12.0+353 Chrome/102.0.5005.167 Electron/19.1.3 Safari/537.36

Checklist

• Please include a minimal, fully reproducible example in a single .qmd file? Please provide the whole file rather than the snippet you believe is causing the issue.
• Please format your issue so it is easier for us to read the bug report.
• Please document the RStudio IDE version you're running (if applicable), by providing the value displayed in the "About RStudio" main menu dialog?
• Please document the operating system you're running. If on Linux, please provide the specific distribution.

[cscheid]

Thanks for the report. It's a known problem, and you've identified the cause: nonstandard filesystems have semantics that appear to not be well supported by the runtime we're using (deno). We will solve this issue in the near-to-medium term, but interactions with the filesystem are delicate and we want to make sure we do it right.

In the meantime, we recommend using local filesystems.

[cderv]

For reference, it seems some users have no problem using Quarto on One Drive: #7473 (comment)

[roanbuma]

Alternative solution without using local folders (Windows 11): disable Dropbox synchronisation in the taskbar for 30 minutes. This instantly solved the issue for me.

[Thiago-Alckmin]

This is amazing, thank you for your recommendation! Way better than having to separate workflows.