You might see that the Dropbox Community team have been busy working on some major updates to the Community itself! So, here is some info on what’s changed, what’s staying the same and what you can expect from the Dropbox Community overall.

Forum Discussion

BryanmMac's avatar
BryanmMac
Explorer | Level 4
7 months ago

I can't access the Documents and Download folders on my Mac

've lost access to my Documents and Downloads file on my mac - help??


I started a thread back in July and have created workarounds. When it asked whether I wanted to sync/back-up Desktop, Documents and Downloads folders, I said no, because when I did this with a previous account, this caused problems. I thought that this would mean that my Desktop files etc would just remain on my hard drive, and I would have a Dropbox folder with things I wanted to back up to the cloud.

But this has caused all the icons to disappear from my Desktop!
 
Logging out of Dropbox didn't help. I tried uninstalling DropBox and reinstalling and that also did not help.
 
Please help.
  • Megan's avatar
    Megan
    7 months ago

    Have you tried out the steps my colleague, Hannah provided in this thread on how to revert your content back to their original locations? 

  • Hannah's avatar
    Hannah
    Icon for Dropbox Staff rankDropbox Staff

    Hey BryanmMac, thanks for reaching out to our Community.

     

    Let's see what we can find out about this.

     

    From what you're saying, it sounds like you did previously enable the Backup feature on this computer, because without Backup, you wouldn't have had Dropbox syncing icons on your Desktop files.

     

    Did you recently get a notification to update Backup on your Dropbox app maybe?

     

    If you go to your backups page online, do you see that this particular computer is being backed up?

     

    Let me know what you see.

    • BryanmMac's avatar
      BryanmMac
      Explorer | Level 4

      This is what I see. I do not believe I have Backup enabled.

       

      I need my Documents and Downloads returned to local control.

      • Hannah's avatar
        Hannah
        Icon for Dropbox Staff rankDropbox Staff

        Thanks for the screenshot, Bryan.

         

        So, this tells me you had enabled backup, but it's unlinked for some reason.

         

        If you go through the Dropbox app preferences, click on the "backups" tab and then on "manage backups", what do you see there?

  • Megan's avatar
    Megan
    Icon for Dropbox Staff rankDropbox Staff

    Hey BryanmMac, when you say that your Documents and Downloads are missing: do you have problems locating them both locally, and online when looking at your Dropbox account? 

     

    Would you mind checking your events page, and letting me know what you see there? The Events page at www.dropbox.com/events gives you an overview of all activity in your account including files events (adds/edits/deletes). 

    • BryanmMac's avatar
      BryanmMac
      Explorer | Level 4

      Hi Megan, I want both folders to remain on my MAC and not be located within my Dropbox file system. I don't care if I lose sync access.

       

      • Megan's avatar
        Megan
        Icon for Dropbox Staff rankDropbox Staff

        Have you tried out the steps my colleague, Hannah provided in this thread on how to revert your content back to their original locations?