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

Dirty_White_Hat's avatar
Dirty_White_Hat
Explorer | Level 4
3 years ago

How to read .dropbox.device file?

From discussions here I see that the `.dropbox.device` is used to remember the settings for a particular drive.

I am performing forensics on a recovered USB drive. It has a `.dropbox.device` file on it now. This is obviously evidence that the USB drive was plugged in to a computer running DropBox.

The question is what can I learn from reading this file? It's in an unknown binary format so I need some sort of tool to read it. Is there a developer tool like this that I can get access to?

Things I would want to learn:

  • Were files from the USB uploaded?
  • What DropBox user account accessed this device?

This sort of information would help me to determine if someone has compromised information from this device and who!

  • Jay's avatar
    Jay
    3 years ago

    Hi Dirty_White_Hat, currently there isn't any method to format the .dropbox.device file in a readable format for security and privacy purposes.

     

    If you wish, you can suggest this change for others to vote on, so the dev team can look into this in future.

  • Mark's avatar
    Mark
    Icon for Super User II rankSuper User II

    There is no tool to access this I'm afraid its an encrypted part of the Dropbox system and that is it. 

    • Dirty_White_Hat's avatar
      Dirty_White_Hat
      Explorer | Level 4

      Oof, well someone on the developer team has the ability to read it. It sounds like you're saying it's not going to be released to the public.

      • Jay's avatar
        Jay
        Icon for Dropbox Staff rankDropbox Staff

        Hi Dirty_White_Hat, currently there isn't any method to format the .dropbox.device file in a readable format for security and privacy purposes.

         

        If you wish, you can suggest this change for others to vote on, so the dev team can look into this in future.

About Create, upload, and share

Find help to solve issues with creating, uploading, and sharing files and folders in Dropbox. Get support and advice from the Dropbox Community.

Need more support

If you need more help you can view your support options (expected response time for an email or ticket is 24 hours), or contact us on X or Facebook.

For more info on available support options for your Dropbox plan, see this article.

If you found the answer to your question in this Community thread, please 'like' the post to say thanks and to let us know it was useful!