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
Deleted folders keep reappearing
I'm hoping someone can help with this problem. I have been using Dropbox for a few years across a number of devices (2 desktop Macs, a laptop, an iPhone and an iPad). This last week, when I try to delete a folder it reappears a moment later. If I move it into another folder, the same thing happens. I have checked and all my other devices are switched off or not trying to sync while I am doing this. Any advice on how to stop it?
Thanks!
The web interface should only recreate the folder if a device connected instructs it to.
So one of your devices must not be selectively synced, or has some greater issue.
(1) Check each device to see if the folder is present on the device, and remove it. If it comes back its not that device that ordered it created. If it wont delete then thats the device that cant delete it so orders it recreated. Fix that device.
(2) Failing that, take all devices off line, delete the folder via the web, then bring devices online one by one, and watch for the folder being created, when it is, it was the device you just brought online.
Think I found an answer for this. Log on to the browser version. Go to Settings (on the dropdown under your sign in). Click on Security tab. Scroll down until you see your devices. I had several devices listed that I don't use anymore. Once I removed those devices, the delete function started working, both online and on my desktop. You will be able to see if you have such a problem by looking at the last time the device was accessed.
Did not work for me. The only devises that show are accurate.
I have had the same issue.
The problem was that the folder on Dropbox (web) contained a file that not existed in the folder on my pc (because of an old selective sync).
I have manually deleted that file from the web and then I have succesfully deleted the folder from the pc (without it being reappeared).
P.S.: you could argue that selective sync doesn't work on single files, but it is not completely true...
- This did not work for my case. Deleted all the old devices and the files still kept reappearing.
I tried both Travel R. and Janet H.4's solutions and they didn't work, or they worked in combination with signing in to my account online and delete the second folder manually, but be careful, I noticed online that the duplicate folder had a folder that the original folder didn't have, maybe there was some glitch or corruption going on there, so I selected that folder inside the duplicate folder I was trying to delete and moved over to the original folder I am trying to keep. After that I deleted the duplicate folder online and now Dropbox works fine! No more duplicate folder keep popping up. So idk if it was a combination of these three solution or what, maybe try my solution deleting the duplicate online (MAKE SURE folders are all same you don't want to lose anything), if that doesn't work try Travel R and Janet H.4's solutions. I think deleting old devices that Janet H.4 suggested should be done anyways.
Would be nice if one of the staff members could say something about this issue.
My main problem was dragging files from the internet browser to my dropbox – mostly .weblog or image-files which contains a character like «|» or «:».
What makes this really bad is that the Dropbox App does not complain. If I sync a folder which contains files with bad characters (which somehow were uploaded to Dropbox anyway) the folder on my Mac looks like it was empty, the green iocn symbolizes that it is synced correctly and that there are no files left to be synced. I deleted a lot of these empty folders from my Dropbox, so I deleted a lot of my files accidentally, because on my computer it showed up as empty, but in reality the folder was not empty.
DROPBOX TEAM: This is serious!!
If it where not for selective syncing and tag-support I would leave Dropbox because of this now.
If the folder is empty, insert a file into it, and then delete the folder, this is a known glitch (unknown cause)
.
If the folder has a file appearing in it, then right click the file and check previous versions, for the machine that is uploading it again, this machine is normally failing to delete the file, and following that finds the file still there so thinks its a new file and uploads it again.I have the problem of folders reappearing moments after I try to delete or move them. They have files in them already, but just in case, I added another. They still reappear. :(
thank you sou much - that helped! I hope this bug will be fixed soon - it is not very "Dropbox-like" to have such stupid bugs..
It doesn't work!
Have you tried TSP's suggestion above:
"For others – this seems to work:
- Go to Dropbox Bad Files Check
- Manually rename all reported files on the Dropbox website
- Check again if all errors have been corrected
This is a tedious process when you have thousands of bad files. So prepare for hours of manual renaming :("
This is what I had to undertake in full. It works online, not locally. Then I was able to delete folder and get rid of them.
Good luck with sorting this.
I have had this happen a few times over several years of using Dropbox. The solutions on this page did not work for me unfortunately - i tried them all. Then i figured I would try saving a new folder with exactly the same name on my desktop, drag it into the Dropbox folder and when prompted 'An item named “_______” already exists in this location. Do you want to replace it with the one you’re moving?' I chose to 'Replace'.
This allows Dropbox to re-synchronise with a new non corrupted/ non problematic version of the folder, and can be deleted without issue. Hope this helps.
- Other strategies didn't work for me. This one did. Thanks.
- Didn't work on mine. Nothing has worked
- Worked for me! Thanks, it was driving me crazy, that file had been in the wrong place for 2 months.
- Zed
Dropbox Staff
Hello everyone,
Though rare, occasionally old or deleted files may reappear in your Dropbox. If this is the case, we can roll back your account to the point before this event occurred, or undo the individual addition events.
- To roll back your entire account, please carefully follow the instructions in this earlier section of the article
- To undo individual addition events, please carefully follow the instructions in this article
Otherwise, you can simply review those reappearing files and remove them from your Dropbox by navigating to the website and delete them.
if you have files on your Dropbox but you do not want them to appear on your Computer or some folder re appear on your device, you can review your Selective Sync settings.
Please review this Help Center article regarding missing, reappearing and corrupted files and in case none of the options help you, so that our support team can investigate more on this, please go to www.dropbox.com/support and submit a ticket request.
Thank you!
I was able to solve this same problem by deleting the folder from on the dropbox website interface.
This issue is still happening here too, and the suggestion here failed to resolve it.
If it helps, in my case, it was about presence of folders that I explicitly marked for not syncing. Since there is not .ignore folder for dropbox (AFAIK), it syncs the folder the moment we add, and then we have to go into settings and unselect it for sync. This leaves a copy on the server. To overcome the problem of reappearing parent folder I reincluded the folder I excluded earlier, let it sync, and then deleted the parent folder.
How do you "unselect it for sync"?
I just had this problem and it turned out that there were some files in a folder, but they couldn't be copied to the windows installation of dropbox because they had illegal filenames in windows. Specifically, they had single quotes and double quotes (at least one of those isn't legal in a file name).
These files were created on the mac a years ago, and somehow they keep appearing on my various computers despite my best efforts to eliminate them.
Anyway... I fixed the problem by
- Going to the web version of dropbox
- Upgrading to the dropbox that allows you to see file versions (which used to be standard with a premium account)
- Locating the illegally named files
- Renaming them to legal names
- Permanently deleting the old file (just in case)
- Moving / deleting the newly renamed files
This problem could probably also happen with illegally long file names and unicode characters in file names. These are all problems that I have encountered and which have given me more grey hair than nearly anything else in my life.
I'm pretty sure that was possible on the Mac create idiotic file names that are not valid in Linux, Windows, or even across all Macs. I'm not interested in reproducing this error for the mac fanboys out there.
PS: This is Gene, Kindy's husband, not Kindy. She's not this cranky, at least not on public forums. We just use the same Dropbox account.
PPS: Before you get mad at Dropbox, you should know that Dropbox is better than anything else at managing these sorts of problems. From a programming perspective, Dropbox is freaking amazing. So please save your anger for the many other less amazing software products out there.
I tried the solutions suggested here without success - it turned out there was a file in the folder that was not visible on my mac - so, have a look online and make sure there isn't an "invisible" file causing a problem. When I deleted this file online I was then able to delete the folder on my mac.
Note: The issue occurs on the mac but also when deleting in the Dropbox browser interface.
Ok so it seems as though I've had the same problem as everyone else. My Dropbox was working fine, had some folders on there that mostly contained music. However, I recently backed up a bunch of different computers and used Dropbox to store the files. This ended up being ~200k+ files. Initially, the Dropbox app synced it until I deselected it using selective sync. What I did not expect to happen afterwards, and ended up causing my Mid-2015 13" Macbook Pro Retina to start blowing out air like it was on fire, was that it had to download what was then a massive file list. I guess Dropbox calls this "indexing", despite the fact I had already chosen for it not to sync. So access Dropbox though the browser and delete the folder that contains all the files. Didn't work. Uninstalled and reinstalled the app, nothing. Today, I went back and saw the folder had reappeared as others have stated. Deleted it again, froze my browser so I force quit. I come back and it's gone, I double check the event log and it states that 200k+ files were deleted. I check the icon in the menu bar and it still shows its attempting to download and index the file list, so I go to security settings through the browser and unlink all the old devices I no longer use, as well as the computers I had to backup. Still the same issue occurred. Then, what ultimately solved the problem was simply deleting the Dropbox folder on my computer which then brought up a prompt window stating that "this computer used to be synced to your account, do you wish to place the folder back in its location or relink the account". Choose relink and login, problem solved.
