Photos and videos backed up now showing as zero byte 'empty files'

[elzocalo]

Around 9 years ago my wife and I returned from vacation and she uploaded all her photos and videos from her little camera to Dropbox. She forgot all about this, and we had for years thought the photos were lost. Well, she recently logged into her Dropox and found all the photos and videos in there. Some of them are fine and open well for viewing, but most of them are showing as 'zero byte' and don't open at all. Can someone help us open those 'zero byte' files?  

[Mark]

It is almost certainly unlikely she will be able to do so I'm afraid. 

If they are 0 byte files there is no data in them - they are empty, hence the 0 bytes. This usually happens when you are using a Mac computer where you copy the files from one location to another - Apple makes the file holder first (at 0 bytes) and then populates it. Dropbox see's these as files, as thats what they are, and uploads them, but if you dont wait for the moving of the files over in to the Dropbox folder to complete OR the syncing to Dropbox to complete OR run out of space before they finish uploading the larger 'full' files they wont ever make it to Dropbox.

You can try clicking on one of the files three dots to the side of its name and 'restore previous versions'. If anything IS recoverable from previous versions it is in there. If not, I'm afraid they are lost