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Why did all of my files disappear?
A folder that is owned by me and shared with two others is now empty. What happened to all of my image files? How do I get them back?
As I am a basic user, the policy of dropbox says I can only recover the files deleted within 30days as they will be deleted for real!!! Can someone tell me whether this statement is really true or it is just bullshit and I might have chances to let the staff of dropbox to recover them?
That is correct. Basic accounts, or Pro accounts without the Extended Version History addon, can only recover files for 30 days from the date they were deleted. Beyond that they cannot be recovered, even by Dropbox staff.
rjothvas wrote:
... a Basic account that I haven't used in awhile ...
How long is a while? If an account remains idle for more than a year, Dropbox will remove it, which also removes all files from the system.
... and now it's telling mee that it can't find any of my folders, and dropbox made me use InstallerIs it possible that you started a new account, instead of signing into your old one? If the old one had been removed and you installed with the same email address, you would have started a new, empty account.
are my files now all gone? If not, where are they?If you're signing in with the same email address and the account is empty, then it's likely as I described above. Otherwise you can try checking the Events page and Deleted Files to see if the files are there, or see if it lists what happened. If both pages are empty (aside from anything new you've done), then you're in a new account.
I did get a resolution to my issue. I think I got a little lucky, but I ended up figuring out what happened on my own, and was able to retrieve my files.
I am not sure how, but the deletion event (of 18526 files) appeared in the event log, since it was not there previously. I suspect someone at Dropbox did something to make it appear, but I am almost 100% sure it was not there when I placed my support request.
Once I was able to track which files were actually missing, I was able to connect it to an issue with a Dropbox crash and selective sync.
Earlier on the day that all my files were deleted, I had selective synced all of the deleted files to another machine. It looks to me that, instead of selective syncing them, it deleted the files (not all of them, but random ones from the folders I selected). I remember that the first time I went through the selective sync process, Dropbox had crashed when I submitted my selections. I had to relaunch it and restart the process. It was not long after that where the deletion event occurred.
Once I identified what had happened, the Dropbox customer service team simply restored the event.
Again, in my case I got lucky, but I believe that these event happen most commonly after crashes.
If your Dropbox ever crashes, be sure to note the time and what you were doing. It may help you in the future.
