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currentcapital's avatar
currentcapital
Helpful | Level 6
9 years ago
Solved

Randomly deleted files and folders

Anyone else experiencing files and folders being deleted from Dropbox without human intervention?   I know that I'm going to get the stock Dropbox answer here that it can't happen, but I can expl...
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  • Jane's avatar
    Jane
    8 years ago
     
    Hey Daz, 
     
    Welcome to the Dropbox Community, let me send over some tips below regarding your inquiry and we’ll take it from there! 
     
     SKBJ ‘s reply could point you towards the right direction, though you may need to dig deeper, depending on the behavior you’ve noticed. 
     
    Firstly, as Dropbox syncs any files added to it, a virus or malicious software would get updated to all computers linked to the account accordingly. If the virus or malicious software is in a shared folder, shared folder members and computers may also be affected. That being said, I’d strongly recommend removing it as soon as possible, as it’ll definitely create more issues in the long run. 
     
    Secondly, it recently came to attention that connecting or pointing external locations (i.e. Symlinking them) to your Dropbox folder might cause unexpected behavior, so it may appear to you as if files are randomly deleted. That being said, I’d advise you to have a look intro this as well, just as a possible scenario. 
     
    Regardless of the cause, if you need further clarifications or you’d like your account reverted back to a particular point in time, my advice would be to reach out directly to our team, who’ll guide you through the necessary steps and actions you’d need to take, so as to revert back to normal operations. 
     
    If you decide to go per my advice above, you may keep in mind that I’m always here to pursue a resolution, so please let me know a ticket ID I could reference in your next reply. 
     
    I’m looking forward to hearing back from you on this discussion! 
Cmk77's avatar
Cmk77
Explorer | Level 4
9 years ago

So this is what i got from sugarsync this morning - sounds like a totally reasonable task... bahahaha. i have hundreds of folder and sub folder... so let's pick a task that is not rational to perform and call the case closed... - how goes it at the dropbox end??? Apparantly we are ANOTHER PART OF THE WORLD... soon to be seperated by a wall I suppose... but really... had a good chuckle and thought I would share.

 

Thank you for contacting SugarSync Technical Support. I'm sorry to hear you have been having difficulty, but I'm happy to help.

That error is experienced by customers that are located in other parts of the world where there are special characters in their alphabet. The reason the error crops up is because when SugarSync experiences any of those special characters that it is not coded to recognize, it throws that log error, which essentially means "I don't understand what this means". It is not an error in the sense that it will stop SugarSync from running properly, it may just take time for SugarSync to realize that the special character it is seeing somewhere is valid and works.

Unfortunately the logs will just continue to process that information because at this current time SugarSync is not fully supported in every language and area of the world.

We suggest you can try to set the language to American English to see that changes anything. One thing we can think of is the date format is different for America as opposed to Canada. America uses MM/DD/YYYY as opposed to Canada uses DD/MM/YYYY.

If you have any further questions, please let us know. Thank you for using SugarSync!

  • currentcapital's avatar
    currentcapital
    Helpful | Level 6
    9 years ago

    @CMK77

     

    I love that a software says it's because of the date structure! The whole world, except the USA, uses DD/MM/YY as the format - so what they are saying is that if you're not in the US, you shouldn't use their software?

     

    Sounds like they have the same bug in their software - which clearly is your fault for using a standard naming structure :-)

     

    So it's not just Dropbox that is doing this...

     

    It's a real problem - but obviously one these companies don't want to admit exists.

     

    Haven't had any of the "Super Users" from these forums back on - guess they don't have a cut and paste answer to give when someone challenges their assertions.

     

    Will keep trying to find what does this but not optimistic. As I've said before, I'm not a computer tech. Will have a look at other solutions to see if they are encountering the same problems and report back when I've had a chance to look through. Going to be very, very, very careful around reading all the comments for each company to see if users have experienced the same problems. Should have vetted Dropbox more thoroughly before I signed up - a mistake I won't make again!

     

    Cheers

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