Dropbox keeping files that were previously deleted
October 3, 2020 10:30 AM Subscribe
I had to restore my computer (Mac) from a backup from a couple of months ago. I use Dropbox and now it has files from those months ago that had been deleted/reorganized in the intervening months. Shouldn't Dropbox's sync have fixed this? What can I do to fix this?
Response by poster: It is a shared Dropbox and thus difficult to deal with files one by one.
Is there something I should have done before starting to prevent the problem?
posted by sciencegeek at 10:52 AM on October 3, 2020
Is there something I should have done before starting to prevent the problem?
posted by sciencegeek at 10:52 AM on October 3, 2020
Prevention wise, one option would have been to delete the local Dropbox folder after restoring the backup, so that the reorganized files would be synced with an empty folder. That would have prevented the confusion about whether the files on your hard drive were "new" files that need to be uploaded or old files that should be deleted. I doubt that this would have occurred to me in the moment, though.
To fix it now, it appears that there is a feature for paid Dropbox accounts called DropBox Rewind, that would let you automatically revert back to how things were before the incident. If there's been a lot of good changes done since the incident, you'll need to watch out as they will also be undone, but depending on the scale of the issue, that may be the easiest way to fix things.
And as a manual version of Rewind, if you log in to the website, there's a "Recent" section that shows your recent activity. For me, it shows everything I've done in the last month or so (if I click "Show 10+ More" and keep scrolling). For each item, there's a little "..." dropdown menu on the right, that has options. It may be possible to either use this list directly to delete all the old stuff you uploaded, or to copy/paste the list to another document and use it as a checklist of files/folders to fix.
posted by yuwtze at 12:31 PM on October 3, 2020
To fix it now, it appears that there is a feature for paid Dropbox accounts called DropBox Rewind, that would let you automatically revert back to how things were before the incident. If there's been a lot of good changes done since the incident, you'll need to watch out as they will also be undone, but depending on the scale of the issue, that may be the easiest way to fix things.
And as a manual version of Rewind, if you log in to the website, there's a "Recent" section that shows your recent activity. For me, it shows everything I've done in the last month or so (if I click "Show 10+ More" and keep scrolling). For each item, there's a little "..." dropdown menu on the right, that has options. It may be possible to either use this list directly to delete all the old stuff you uploaded, or to copy/paste the list to another document and use it as a checklist of files/folders to fix.
posted by yuwtze at 12:31 PM on October 3, 2020
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by Alensin at 10:44 AM on October 3, 2020