You might see that the Dropbox Community team have been busy working on some major updates to the Community itself! So, here is some info on what’s changed, what’s staying the same and what you can expect from the Dropbox Community overall.
Forum Discussion
How to restore files from Dropbox Backup
I recently backed up 200-GB of files from an external hard drive that was getting old. I used the DropBox Backup feature figuring it would be easier to simply use a "restore" feature rather than manu...
Jay
Dropbox Staff
Dropbox StaffHi janenipius, are you following these steps to restore from a previous computer backup onto your machine?
Those instructions did not work for me and presumably the same thing for @doesitwork. Let me provide more context on my usecase. I have a large usb stick that I do all of my work on and keep inserted in my computer. I set up Dropbox Backup to sync this stick to Dropbox in case anything happens to my physical usb stick. Something DID happen to my physical usb stick that rendered it unusable. I bought a new usb stick thinking I could just 1-click restore the data I've backed up onto this new stick.
Instead, I receive no prompt from the desktop app to "restore from backup". Instead, I see an error message that "to restore sync, please re-insert the usb stick". There's no other options or prompts to restore. My only recourse is to "To only restore a part of your computer backup or any part of your external hard drive backup onto a new computer:" and select each folder I need to download. Of course, there's a limit on the number of files that can be zipped, so this is a very slow and manual process. In addition, there's no option for me to save the files directly to a location of my choice. They go directly to my Downloads folder so I then need to move them to the usb stick because my hard drive doesn't have the space for everything.
Looking at this carbonite comparison https://experience.dropbox.com/resources/dropbox-backup-vs-carbonite, I don't see why I shouldn't use carbonite instead. Carbonite plus seems to do everything that I need and perhaps they've actually designed for this not uncommon scenario. It seems like @doesitwork has the exact same issue as me, but to a worse degree, considering they have 200gb of files.
- Jay
Hi janenipius, just for clarification, are you referring to an external drive backup, or a computer backup, which are both different things?
Do you have your computer backup enabled while having your Dropbox folder stored on the external drive?
I do not have computer backup enabled. I am using the external drive backup feature
- Jay
This would be the reason then, since restoring from a computer backup would add the files onto your account directly.
External drive backups are different, and would need to be downloaded via the method shown in my previous link, which would be by zipping the drive and downloading it.
If the drive is large, you can try downloading it in batches by selecting specific folders inside the backup to download.
