After connecting my external drive to Dropbox, my files were deleted!

[MLTSS]

Not sure if this is the right category but I'm hoping you can help.

Our Dropbox was at its limit so I moved a bunch of files to an external drive to use for overflow storage. It seems I logged into my online Dropbox with the drive plugged in and Dropbox did a sync and now my drive files are identical to the ones online ALL my overflow files are GONE.

Is there a way to restore them?? I looked in Deleted files and there is nothing there...

Thanks.

[Nancy]

Hey @MLTSS, thanks for posting on our forum today. 

From what you mention, I understand you activated external drive backup, correct?

Now, as for your overflow files, do you mean that you had made updates to the files on your external drive, and once Dropbox Backup was enabled, these updates were overwritten by older versions of your files, which existed on Dropbox? 

Let me know, and we’ll go from there.

[MLTSS]

Hi Nancy,

I did not activate external drive backup, I moved files from Dropbox to the external drive to free up Dropbox space. 

The next time I went to access the overflow files I had moved to my external drive, they were all gone and had been replaced with duplicates of the files I had left in Dropbox, so it appears Dropbox synced the two and removed all of my overflow files from the external drive.

[BenDBX]

Hi @MLTSS,

Would you mind if we reached out to the email associated with your account to gather some more information?

Thanks,
Ben

[MLTSS]

Hi Ben,

Please do! 

Thanks,

Marylou

[Hannah]

Hey @MLTSS, I just sent you an email, so we'll continue investigating there.

Thanks!