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Newest version lost!

We have a document that we work on every day. We have it on autosave so it saves automatically few times pr day. All of a sudden this morning it restores to a version from may 3rd and everything happening since then is lost! Anyone had this experience and can help with the solution. When going to the restoring page it only shows the version from may 3rd. Very strange.

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Accepted answers

Jane

Hey @dfcooke, I appreciate your swift update here; please accept my apologies for getting back to you in delay!

I understand the inconvenience this may have caused you, though you may keep in mind that sometimes software don’t play well with one another. If I were in your shoes, I’d keep an eye on progress (especially if I located any discrepancies) & from there, I’d check if I could narrow down the possible causes through trial & error.

Around this point, I’d suggest contacting our team as well, so as to examine a specific example through our Official Support Channel & cross-check our findings.

Last but not least, I’d be happy to follow-up with you if you need further clarifications or assistance with Dropbox, just keep me updated in your reply. Thanks again & I hope you have a great rest of the day ahead!

- @Alex_jlm_sdd are you still experiencing any Dropbox-related issues? Please keep me updated on this correspondence & I'll make sure to look into the matter with you here!

[This thread is now closed due to inactivity. If you have a similar or new question, you can ask here]

All comments

C D.4

Yes! I've had this happen twice - once with a Microsoft Excel file which was shared, and once with a Powerpoint file which wasn't. Lots of saves in both cases, but somehow all of the changes got lost (that's days of work in the first case - 'only' five solid hours of urgent work in the second). And yep, the only version on offer was the reverted one. Very upsetting and extremely inconvenient.

But one clue I have is that in the second case (and quite possibly the first), there had been a software crash. (The file was being edited by Powerpoint in Office 2011 for the Mac, and the file type was the older '.ppt'). And my thought afterwards was: maybe, as Microsoft Office does its autosaves in weird ways and then has to 'recover' the document after a crash, the temporary files that it uses to do it were NOT being saved on Dropbox, or at least something about Dropbox meant that they didn't get used in the file's recovery - so that Office couldn't/ didn't recover the file as it should, and instead Dropbox replaced it with the last 'healthy' version.

I would really appreciate somebody from Dropbox looking into this urgently, as I and my colleagues are now resorting to working offline on important Office files and then only copying them back to Dropbox after saving and quitting - which loses half the value of having Dropbox so seamless in the first place. (What's my subscription fee for, exactly?)

dianalee d.

I'm not seeing any replies to this or similar posts. Does Dropbox staff monitor these questions?

I'm having the same problem:

I enter new data into an Microsoft Excel spreadsheet every few days. I store it in Dropbox. Each time I open it from Excel 2010, add my new data, save, and close the file.

At the end of July (2016) I opened the file as usual. Everything I'd entered from June 22 on was gone. To try to retrieve the data, I did the following:

1. I checked the file folders for possible other files, such as an unclosed Excel copy

2. I checked my laptop to see if it contained a copy in the local Dropbox folder that was newer

3. I checked the Web version on Dropbox. Only the June 21 version was there.

4. I checked for previous versions. There are zero intermediate versions! It's as if I never entered and saved anything all those dates in July. What happened to the daily saves? I have no way to get that data back.

Each time I started my computer for previous dates, the Dropbox icon in the tray said that all files were up to date. Each time I started Excel to enter new data, the latest data was always there--until this last time.

Two things were new since I opened the file last with good data:

* I upgraded both machines from Windows 8.1 to 10

* I upgraded Dropbox from Basic to Pro

After upgrading each machine to Windows 10, Dropbox had put up a message saying I could not sync my files until I reinstall Dropbox, which I did. I assumed I needed a Win 10-compatible version of the main program.

Now it's all lost. I am afraid to look at all the rest of my projects and want to know how I can trust Dropbox. What am I spending my money for if Dropbox loses my old versions?

Both local copies and the cloud copy have been rolled back to a month-old version and all intermediates have disappeared. Trying not to panic.

Did Dropbox cloud have a problem with backups and restores? How do I get this data? Who do I call?

seacloud

did anybody hear back from dropbox on this yet, or find another solution? I'm having same problem.

Jane

Hey @seacloud,

I’m here to work on that with you as closely as possible!

In order to make sure I’m sending over the most appropriate next steps, could you let me know whether the behavior is close to @dianalee d.’s description?

You may keep in mind that if the file in question is in a shared folder, it’s highly likely that one of your colleagues (or friends) has a synced computer running an application that’s using it, hence causing it to go back to the previous version (i.e. not saving the most recent changes). To check and see if another computer or person is accessing this file, you can look at the previous versions on your account online.

Once you check there & see that it was accessed from an application on another computer, you can delete it off of that computer (or close the application that’s using it).

I hope this answers your question, though please keep me updated here in case you need further assistance. I hope you have a great rest of the day ahead!

dfcooke

The same or very similar thing just happened to me:

A (very important) excel file that I edit and save dozens of times each month suddenly opens today as the Dec 1 2017 version, a loss of 6 weeks of work. This reversion to an old version is seen in the synced local file and in my online account. Online, when I click "load older versions", I get "An error occurred while loading," and only the Dec 1 version is listed.

I'm running excel mac 2011 on a 2013 mac book pro. The trigger seemed to be updating OSX from 10.9 (I think) to 10.13.2 today. I didn't bother to back up files because all of my important files are on Dropbox where I *thought* they were safe. This Dropbox Plus account syncs to 3 computers, although the folder containing this file (which is not shared) just syncs to 1 or 2 of these. If it syncs to my work computer, I hope to be able to recover a quite recent version tomorrow when I go in and start that computer (disconnected from internet to prevent syncing).

This is a file that I pretty much always have open. FWIW, I have rebooted the computer multiple times since Dec 1, and this file automatically re-opened each time. Word files and another excel file I've worked on regularly recently are unaffected by this problem.

It's very important to me to (1) get this file back and (2) figure out what happened and/or how to prevent this so that I have reason to continue to use and trust Dropbox.

Any help would be highly appreciated!

Alex_jlm_sdd

I have the exact same issue as above. What is the point of Dropbox if these issues persist?

dfcooke

Sorry it happened to you too!

FYI, I think I probably need to shift the blame from dropbox to excel. I checked a back-up version of the file on an external hard drive and it too had not been saved since Dec 1, 2017. My best guess is that excel was not not saving even when I clicked save. Alternatively it was saving to some temporary file that got wiped out when I upgraded my OS. Theoretically excell should be autosaving to a temporary files (without me clicking "save") but I cannot find any such files. I can find word autosave files, but not excel. Perhaps a workaround would be saving-as a new file name once in a while? I no longer trust excel.

Best of luck

Jane

Hey @dfcooke, I appreciate your swift update here; please accept my apologies for getting back to you in delay!

Around this point, I’d suggest contacting our team as well, so as to examine a specific example through our Official Support Channel & cross-check our findings.

- @Alex_jlm_sdd are you still experiencing any Dropbox-related issues? Please keep me updated on this correspondence & I'll make sure to look into the matter with you here!

[This thread is now closed due to inactivity. If you have a similar or new question, you can ask here]