We're making changes to the Community, so you may have received some notifications - thanks for your patience and welcome back. Learn more here.
Forum Discussion
Disk errors causing Dropbox to delete files
Hi community, I recently noticed some unexpected 'deleted files' activity on my account. Initially I assumed it was user error, that I’d mistakenly deleted these files somehow. So I restored...
Jay
Dropbox Staff
Dropbox StaffHi RSpencer, Dropbox is primarily a syncing service instead of a backup service. This means that any changes to files, including deletions, would be synced to the site.
This would occur on any location that the Dropbox folder is located. I/O errors would also mean that files are unreadable, meaning they 'don't exist' according to the system, so the files would be deleted from the Dropbox site. There isn't any way to prevent these types of errors from deleting files from your account.
If the Dropbox folder is located on an external drive, and that drive is disconnected while the app is running, this could result in data deletion. On the rare instance that an internal drive is disconnected (due to other hardware issues), this can also occur.
If you need any more details, feel free to message back.
Hi, I had the exactly same problem. An internal hard drive of PC, synced with dropbox, failed a couple days ago and I released that most of my dropbox contents have been erased in other PC with sync. Very scary! I think it needs to be check how this can be happening.
- Walter
Hey dyk1, sorry to hear about this.
Can you please take a look at your events page and let us know how exactly those deletions are logged there?
Any additional information you can share about the incident would be much appreciated.
