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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.
Ok, so the same thing happened to me. Only I uninstalled the dropbox app before trying any of this and so how I can get my PC off? This has really messed my computer up and things that were pointing to one location for other uses is now pointing elsewhere and different apps aren't working properly on my computer any more.
I think I got the backups turned off, but My PC is still showing in Dropbox.
- Walter
Dropbox Staff
Hello KarenK14408, thanks for joining the discussion here and sorry to hear you're having issues with this.
Can you please clarify which option did you choose when you disabled the computer backup feature?
Did you choose to 'Keep content in folders on your PC' or 'Leave content in Dropbox'?I do not remember now. But I have solved my problem after uninstalling and re-installing dropbox and I think I went to my account features but and searching around I was finally able to delete all the folders I didn't want sync'd to dropbox including my PC folder. Now everything is working as it should, but for awhile there I was ready to tear my hair out since there were several programs that stopped functioning normally until I got those files removed from dropbox.
