June 3

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Carbonite’s colored dots are not showing. .

By Christopher Mendla

June 3, 2015


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.

Carbonite status dots
Carbonite status dots

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. 

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

The solution posted by that author was to go to the registry key:
 

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 .

I deleted the Dropbox entries but I’m still not seeing the dots. What I did see were other entries such as
 

EnhancedStorageShellSharingPrivate
and 6 for Gdrive such a GDriveSharedEditOverlay

 
I didn’t reboot yet which might be an issue but I suspect that the problem is that another app is still overwriting the carbonite overlays.
Microsoft had a great idea about allowing apps to use overlays on the shell icons.. HOWEVER, they never considered the fact that perhaps more than one application might want to use overlays.

Summary

Either Carbonite has to come up with a solution or Microsoft needs to rethink the way the shell icon overlays work. I eventually got the dots back by a combination of editing the Windows Registry and rebooting. 
 
 
 
 

Christopher Mendla

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  1. 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.

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