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Forum Discussion
Randomly deleted files and folders
Anyone else experiencing files and folders being deleted from Dropbox without human intervention?
I know that I'm going to get the stock Dropbox answer here that it can't happen, but I can expl...
I have computers on syncing on both Windows 10 and Mac Sierra computers. Mid-day yesterday, about 8,000 files and directories were deleted in a single dropbox event. The files appear to have been deleted in alphabetical order over the course of a few minutes. I know it was not the result of human interaction because the deletes took place across hundreds of directories. Some files and folders in these directories were deleted and others were left untouched. Moreover, I was out of the office when the event happened. All the deletes appear as a single event in dropbox.
On my Windows 10 computer, I noticed the Dropbox app was not running (perhaps had crashed) and had not been running for a while, probably around 12 hours). I restarted the app manually probably an hour before the mass random file deletion took place.
This type of random deletion cannot be attributed to human error so it must be a bug. Where do I report bugs?
Is there a way to undo an event in dropbox? If not, how do I get my files restored in an efficient manner? It would take days to manually restore using the links in the event. I can't do a bulk restore because then I would still need to sift through my restored files and redelete thousands of files.
The same thing happened to me. Many files and folders deleted, then restored incompletely and randomly. I did not delete these files. Some have been duplicated, some deleted completely. It has happened in both shared and unshared folders. This is not a syncing issue. I have used Dropbox for years and nothing like this has ever happened. Dropbox tech support is very unhelpful so far.
We are in the same boat. Dropbox "help" has consisted mostly of canned chats and email responses and refusal to give a call back. I've been very disappointed. Our mass deleted docs were also restored randomly and out of place. Once we tried to move them all around appropriately on a desktop version, caused another mass deletion online. No satisfactory explanation from dropbox. Service used to be much better. I hope they acknowlege the cause and get everyone assisted that is having this problem.
- Mark
Super User II
It isnt a bug - it isnt possible to delete files on Dropbox without SOME sort of interaction from a computer or a person. You can go to a file that was deleted via www.dropbox.com/home , click on 'Show Deleted files' and then one of them thats deleted and look at the previous versions. That shows which devices/users instigated the delete command.
Is your Dropbox on an external or network drive? Or, does it contain junctions/symlinks? Thats what usually causes these.
And you can request a rollback at https://help.dropbox.com/delete-restore/recover-deleted-files-folders- I'm not using any symlinks. Some of the files might be shared in a homegroup but not the affected folder.
The deletion operation interaction must have been from a computer as opposed to a user. As I indicated the manner in which the files were deleted, certain files and folders several branches down, while other folders in the same subfolders were unaffected. Again, based on the timestamps on the affected folders (i.e. the modified timestamp updated because subfolders and files were deleted) the time seem to roll in an alphabetical order over the course of a few minutes which would indicate a sync operation. I agree with your statement that it is unlikely that the cloud deleted the files out of the blue, it appears that the app is likely what caused the change since it appears that the deletions took place at about the same pace as a sync operation. Is it possible that starting dropbox on the second computer where it had apparently crashed earlier and was hadn't been running for a day caused a problem? Are their client side sync metadata files that could have been corrupted or gotten out of sync? Perhaps something happened to the metadata on those files on the offline computer and dropbox misunderstood the metadata and deleted the files as part of its sync operation?
I went to the link help link you shared and don't see a rollback option there. Right now we are starting the process of manually restoring the files from the delete event page. Thanks for your reply and help.This has been happing to 100's of people Mark this is a Dropbox problem not a user problem. Dropbox need too address this issue now before 100's of people leave for a better sulotion.
I have just lost 200 powerpoints - that has taken half a lifetime to build up. They were just randomly deleted last week - and I run just a simple imac. There is clearly something very wrong at Dropbox at the moment. I am going back to a good old hard disk
- I went back into my folders to get some master video files and they are gone...It appears as if the ones that were just loosely put in my dropbox they are still there, but some of my larger video files are gone. just empty folders left...Help. I am the only one with access and i know i didn't delete them...100%. I may lose business over this...not good. went into my events and nothing unusual
