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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...
I have computers on syncing on both Windows 10 and Mac Sierra computers. Mid-day yesterday, about 8,000 files and directories were deleted in a single dropbox event. The files appear to have been deleted in alphabetical order over the course of a few minutes. I know it was not the result of human interaction because the deletes took place across hundreds of directories. Some files and folders in these directories were deleted and others were left untouched. Moreover, I was out of the office when the event happened. All the deletes appear as a single event in dropbox.
On my Windows 10 computer, I noticed the Dropbox app was not running (perhaps had crashed) and had not been running for a while, probably around 12 hours). I restarted the app manually probably an hour before the mass random file deletion took place.
This type of random deletion cannot be attributed to human error so it must be a bug. Where do I report bugs?
Is there a way to undo an event in dropbox? If not, how do I get my files restored in an efficient manner? It would take days to manually restore using the links in the event. I can't do a bulk restore because then I would still need to sift through my restored files and redelete thousands of files.
Mark
Super User II
Super User IIIt isnt a bug - it isnt possible to delete files on Dropbox without SOME sort of interaction from a computer or a person. You can go to a file that was deleted via www.dropbox.com/home , click on 'Show Deleted files' and then one of them thats deleted and look at the previous versions. That shows which devices/users instigated the delete command.
Is your Dropbox on an external or network drive? Or, does it contain junctions/symlinks? Thats what usually causes these.
And you can request a rollback at https://help.dropbox.com/delete-restore/recover-deleted-files-folders
- I'm not using any symlinks. Some of the files might be shared in a homegroup but not the affected folder.
The deletion operation interaction must have been from a computer as opposed to a user. As I indicated the manner in which the files were deleted, certain files and folders several branches down, while other folders in the same subfolders were unaffected. Again, based on the timestamps on the affected folders (i.e. the modified timestamp updated because subfolders and files were deleted) the time seem to roll in an alphabetical order over the course of a few minutes which would indicate a sync operation. I agree with your statement that it is unlikely that the cloud deleted the files out of the blue, it appears that the app is likely what caused the change since it appears that the deletions took place at about the same pace as a sync operation. Is it possible that starting dropbox on the second computer where it had apparently crashed earlier and was hadn't been running for a day caused a problem? Are their client side sync metadata files that could have been corrupted or gotten out of sync? Perhaps something happened to the metadata on those files on the offline computer and dropbox misunderstood the metadata and deleted the files as part of its sync operation?
I went to the link help link you shared and don't see a rollback option there. Right now we are starting the process of manually restoring the files from the delete event page. Thanks for your reply and help.This has been happing to 100's of people Mark this is a Dropbox problem not a user problem. Dropbox need too address this issue now before 100's of people leave for a better sulotion.
- Mark@MeandMrsJones - its possible a corrupt crash caused the issue. Especially if its alphabetical. But, its more likely the crash caused the files to be removed locally which was then replicated to Dropbox. If the Dropbox database is corrupt it simply crashes the software and rebuilds from scratch. Its kind of a 'it works or it doesnt' issue, there isnt an in the middle.
In terms of roll back, that link shows you how or tells you to log a ticket via http://bit.ly/cm-support.
@cqcastle. It isnt a Dropbox issue. Look at the code. Dropbox has no code in it AT ALL to remove/edit or change files. It simply isnt possible.
And by all means leave - thankfully thats the open market. But, I'm sure they wont panic over a few 100s with buggy systems leaving - as they are still the largest/growing quickest etc. Remember you can close accounts at www.dropbox.com/account
I have just lost 200 powerpoints - that has taken half a lifetime to build up. They were just randomly deleted last week - and I run just a simple imac. There is clearly something very wrong at Dropbox at the moment. I am going back to a good old hard disk
