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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.
Jay
Dropbox Staff
Dropbox StaffHave the folders been reverted to their former location?
If you move files out of the Dropbox account, do they move out of the desktop folder as well?
If need be, could you try these steps?
If you move files out of the Dropbox account, do they move out of the desktop folder as well?
If need be, could you try these steps?
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.
- JayThanks for the update and feedback on this matter.
If you require any further assistance, please let me know!
