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Forum Discussion
Cannot delete My PC folder (no backup feature turned on) - help please!
My Dad has done something to his dropbox account which has got his system into quite a state, and I haven't been able to figure out exactly what he did or how to fix it.
A few days ago suddenl...
Hi Jay,
Well after many more hours of remotely connecting and mucking around I think we finally got it sorted. I tried the restore default folder location stuff, had all sorts of "reaparse" errors and similar nonsense, finally got the Pictures, Documents etc folders all pointing back to where they were supposed to be.
However having done all of that there was still the "My PC" folder in the dropbox folders and on his account, that refused to go away, and trying to delete files out of it resulted in them being synced down from Dropbox again.
In the end in desperation having seen a suggestion from someone else I turned Backup "on", just so I could then turn it "off" after it got though the "settings" phase. And *finally* got the reassuring message we have been wanting of it saying that it would remove the files from Dropbox and they would only be available locally. And so then I could just delete the local My PC folder and at long last Dropbox is not trying to sync thousands and many GBs of files that my Dad never intentionally at least somehow had happening.
Had I not uninstalled/reinstalled the dropbox client, then possibly we would have had the "Manage" option available on the Backups tab. There is clearly an undesirable "feature" in this scenario that your devs may want to take a look at - as the client is clearly confused about whether backup is turned on or not - it wont let you disable it, but it behaves as if it is turned on.
Anyways thanks for all the attempted help, at least we got there in the end.
Sanchez
Dropbox Staff
Dropbox StaffThanks very much for the reply! In answer to your questions...
1. Windows 10, latest version of your app downloaded from the website yesterday.
2. The app was last "running but with syncing paused". My Dad has just gone on holiday so he would have turned that computer off so not running right now obviously! He has turned off syncing on his machines until this all gets resolved.
3. All his files are on his computer in their original locations. The only files/folders inside his dropbox folder were his normal "sync" folders.
Unfortunately with him doing the holiday thing I can't get him to immediately try things but we would love to have a list of exactly what we need to do for when he gets back. I only found the post about checking backup settings after doing the reinstall where they most definitely are not turned on now. The list of My PC folders it offered to backup was also slightly less than those I see in his web folder online (I listed the five I see on his account in my post above, and the Dropbox app only offered to backup three of that list when I go to the settings).
- LusilHi Kiwidude, it sounds like computer backup is still enabled.
Could you go to the Backup tab under the desktop app's Preferences to check if it's asking you to Manage or Set up?
If you could send us a screenshot, that would also be super helpful.Hi Lusil,
My Dad is away at the moment so I cannot grab a screenshot, I will do when when he gets back in 2 weeks. I am almost certain it said Set Up though - because when I reinstalled the app it gave me the option to setup a backup which I chose no to, then I re-checked afterwards in the Backups tab nothing was ticked in the list of folders so I'm assuming the button was Set Up rather than Manage from memory. It is "possible" that somehow Backups were turned on prior to me reinstalling but now the GUI is confused about it's state? Unfortunately it is still trying to sync the whole computer folders when we turn sync back on.
I still don't know how my Dad could have managed to enable backups in the first place though. He has certainly never been into the Preferences dialog in his life, but the how he got there is less important than how do we fix it at the moment.
- LusilI understand how important this is for you and your father, so please take as much time as you need to gather info.
Give me a nudge whenever you have any updates and I'll make sure to get back to you as soon as possible.
In the meantime, I hope you have a wonderful week ahead!
