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Richie_Cutler's avatar
Richie_Cutler
Explorer | Level 3
2 years ago

Lost Files that were permanently deleted after ransomware.

My company has stored files on Dropbox for 8 years and have recovered from 2 Ransomware hits in that time. We have had easily 1 million + files on Dropbox for business. We use roughly 4-5 TB of storage on their servers.

 

We had another ransomware attack last month and I went on dropbox to recover my files yet this time they had disappeared. I contacted Dropbox support who informed me we didnt have the files stored with them. 

I provided proof that the files were on dropbox to which they replied. The hacker had permanently deleted the files and they are now not recoverable.......ever.

They explained that by law they had to provide a service to permanently delete files when the app requests it. When the hacker encrypted our files he permanently deleted our backup then encrypted the files. I have the encrypted versions in our dropbox folder on the app but no way or recovering them. When I connect the hdd to dropbox it will remove these files also, which I am not doing even though they are encrypted.

 

So as it stands we have lost well over 1 million files, artwork, photoshop psd's and illustrator files along with excel and word documents that all were business critical. We have also lost all our network backups, SQL database backups and server images. 

 

Dropbox have tried rewinding the accounts and tried recovering the accounts and claim that everything is lost..........however they did recover 2 folders from the files that they claim were completely deleted.

 

How can they recover, roughly 2% of the files, that were lost without being able to recover anything. What needs to happen to get the rest of the files back ?

 

I am trying here because everytime I contact support I get them saying we will do a rewind, so I tell them that wont work. They then send me to second level support who reply sorry all files have been deleted. So I ask how come some can be recovered and Support dont even reply they just keep closing the ticket forcing me to start again.

 

I could do with help on the next step. I have sent solicitor letters and emails but nothing is sent back not even support tickets now.

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

    Unfortunately if things are permanently deleted it means exactly that - there is no way around it. They'd be in bigger legal trouble if it turned out that the permanent deletion tool actually didnt. 

     

    Where are your secondary backups? Restore from those? 

    • Richie_Cutler's avatar
      Richie_Cutler
      Explorer | Level 3

      Thats just it though the tool didnt woork because files were recovered that were permanently deleted. 

       

      I am asking if those files, that were permanently deleted, could be restored why not the rest of the files. 

       

      Either way the deletion didnt work because a week later they recovered files. 

       

      Surely there should be a warning or a grace period. Are you sure you want to do this email sent to the master account ? With no deletion until a reply is made. 

       

      This is a backup company who claim to have 180 day retention and can recover files deleted by a hacker yet they cant. It is all false promises.

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

        Richie_Cutler wrote:

        This is a backup company who claim to have 180 day retention and can recover files deleted by a hacker yet they cant. It is all false promises.


        No, it's not a backup company. It's a file synchronization and collaboration company that happens to have some backup-like functionality. If you're using Dropbox purely for backup purposes, you're using the wrong service.

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