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A bunch of my files went to Zero Bytes on Mac

I'm a videographer, and last week I took and copied around 700gb of footage. I imported them all locally to a folder in the root of my Dropbox. I ended up changing the location of this folder in Dropbox, and now around half of the files that I could previously open are showing Zero Bytes on both Dropbox.com and in Finder.

These files are pretty large (20gb a piece) , and I hadn't been able to sync all of them online yet before this happened.

My desktop app still says Syncing 6000+ files, but I'm wondering if there is any chance of recovering the data.

It does say it is indexing a ton of files too. Will they eventually come back? Screen Shot 2020-03-16 at 10.46.40 AM.png

Screen Shot 2020-03-16 at 10.41.24 AM.png

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Accepted answers

Carmen

Hello @rewert, welcome to the Dropbox Community!

As a first attempt to resolve this issue, can you please follow the steps below:

Make sure the Dropbox desktop application is running
Click on the Dropbox icon in your menu bar and then click on the gear in the Notifications panel
Select 'Preferences'
Click on the 'Account' tab
Hold down the 'Option/Alt' key
Click on the 'Fix Permissions' button (make sure you're still holding down the 'Option/Alt' key)
You may be prompted for your a username and password, this is your computer login credentials, not your Dropbox account ones

Give the desktop app some time to sync any changes, and let me know how it goes.

Cheers!

All comments

Carmen

Hello @rewert, welcome to the Dropbox Community!

As a first attempt to resolve this issue, can you please follow the steps below:

Make sure the Dropbox desktop application is running
Click on the Dropbox icon in your menu bar and then click on the gear in the Notifications panel
Select 'Preferences'
Click on the 'Account' tab
Hold down the 'Option/Alt' key
Click on the 'Fix Permissions' button (make sure you're still holding down the 'Option/Alt' key)
You may be prompted for your a username and password, this is your computer login credentials, not your Dropbox account ones

Give the desktop app some time to sync any changes, and let me know how it goes.

Cheers!

rewert

That worked, thank you!

Carmen

Thanks for the update! I'm gald to hear this did the trick.

Let us know if you have any other questions. In the meantime, have a lovely day! :slight_smile:

reisingdw

I'm having this same issue after going thru the "free space on my computer" instructions.

I'm trying to follow your instructions you provided in this post and not seeing what you describe.

Dropbox app on my mac is up and running. done.

Click on the dropbox icon in your menu bar. What menu bar? In the app? if yes - no gear. In my account menu at dropbox.com? agan - no gear or notifications link, or preference link.

Please advise. Thank you.

Walter

Hi @reisingdw; thanks for joining the discussion here.

Are you sure you're accessing the app's preferences through your menu bar?

reisingdw

Finally found the preferences. The like to the "preferences" in your email gave me enough instructions to explore and find the preferences and apply the "fix" instrucitons. Though all files still appear as zero bytes - once I open a file, it shows me the file size and opens properly.

Thank you