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randomly deleted thousands of files this morning

I have ALL my work in my dropbox folder on my mac on an external drive. I've been using it for years. I have my work computer also syncing to an external drive. within dropbox, I have a special folder for ONLY work related files, outside of that folder is all my personal work.

At home, I have all my files available offline. on my work computer, it's set to online only, so I only download what I need.

This morning, I went into one of my older work folders to reference something which would require opening the files. when I opened the first set of files, I noticed a ton of notifications that files were deleted? i did not delete any of these files and I do not have many shared files. but all my shared files are outside of this main work folder, and the only files being deleter were from within this folder.

At first, since it was the beginning of my day, and I had moved some files around and literally deleted 1 file myself, I didn't pay much attention thinking it was just catching up with me and that's all these notifications were. Until I had to go to the next set of files to reference. and the folder they were in which was there only minutes earlier was gone?!

That's when I went to my dropbox online and reviewed all the deleted files. and sure enough they were all there grouped together in seemingly random blocks from different folders all nested in different areas. but ALL the files that were deleted were from within this one folder where i have my work work (as opposed to my personal work). none of my personal work was affected at all.

The only possible (but unlikely) thing I can think of is that last Thursday, I accidentally unplugged the external drive on my work computer. I noticed it within seconds and plugged it back in. But I say this is unlike the cause because it is now Monday, and I worked on my home computer all day Friday with no problems, plus, the work computers dropbox is online only so unplugging the drive would or should have no effect.

And even in spite of me restoring files, I am still seeing a ton of files showing up in that deleted items folder that I am not deleting?! what the heck is going on? I am now resyncing over 13 thousand files?! and it seems that every time I refresh the deleted files page online, there are more files getting deleted that I am not deleting?!

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Comments

msteinhofer

Shoot. an almost immediate followup to this post.

I just removed into my work mac to make sure that nothing funky was happening there. and it seems that my external drive was disconnected again. since I'm not physically there I cannot reconnect it (Disk Utility isn't seeing it so I can't just remount it).

I figured I'd update this post incase anyone else has this happen inexplicably, they'll know they aren't alone.

The reason that only the shared work folder had been affected is that is the first folder in my folder structure.

But what i still think is odd and inexplicable is that my work computer is set to online only, so in my mind, just removing the drive should not have ANY effect since all the files are online, accept ones i had manually downloaded to use at work. while my home computer which is set to be offline, was getting files removed, as well as in dropbox.com? why would a missing drive in online only files cause the online only files to be removed?

In any event, I'm glad I've found (I hope!) the cause of this. I've since quit the dropbox app on my work computer until i can reconnect the drive the next time in the office. so hopefully no more randomly deleting files!

Rich

@msteinhofer wrote:
... it seems that my external drive was disconnected again.

And this is THE reason why storing the Dropbox folder on an external drive is NOT recommended. If the drive becomes disconnected while Dropbox is running, or Dropbox is launched before the drive comes online, Dropbox can see it as a mass-deletion of files and will sync that deletion to your account and other devices.

But what i still think is odd and inexplicable is that my work computer is set to online only, so in my mind, just removing the drive should not have ANY effect since all the files are online

Online-only doesn't matter. There's still a placeholder file on the drive, and if this file is deleted, Dropbox deletes the original file online.

... my external drive was disconnected again.

If this is something that happens often, you want to move your Dropbox folder off of the external drive. There's no way to prevent this from happening if you store Dropbox on an external/removable/network drive.

msteinhofer

Appreciate your input. And 100% acknowledge you're right.

That being said, with computers these days (Macs possibly more so than PCs) coming preconfigured with smaller drive and being cost prohibitive to have an internal SSD larger than 1TB, the only viable option is to maintain files on an external drive. One of the best things about dropbox is that it allows you to store your files on an external drive and still sync. If that was ever removed from the service, I would have to abandon it. As on my home computer, keeping files online only doesn't work well. Like, my issue today for example. If I were in online only mode at home, I would have had to manually download approximately 3GB worth of files before beginning work. which doesn't take more than a few minutes really. But this was to work on 1 document, And I typically jump between up to 10 projects through the day.

On my work computer I use online only mode because I am only using it to transfer files i work on at home to our server when I'm in the office.

Anyhow, my problem appears solved and I'm really just rambling now. The drive(s) in question don't unmount randomly. And I have redundant backups so I'm not totally at risk of loosing anything. Thanks for your input! 🙂

Steve_in_Japan

I have used Dropbox for years with never a problem or a worry, until the past three weeks when Dropbox went rogue and deleted ~17,000 files in three incidents. The files did not show up in the deleted files list; however, the event log claimed that I deleted 8,763 files on 26 August, and 3,420 files plus 5,326 files in two incidents on 27 August. I did no such thing! The two incidents on 27 August occurred when I was not even at home! Moreover, the deleted files were not in any one place. They were scattered all through the entire directory. These files were stored on my computer as well as on Dropbox and were deleted on both

This is entirely unacceptable and renders Dropbox completely unreliable.

Rich

@Steve_in_Japan wrote:
... Dropbox went rogue and deleted ~17,000 files in three incidents. The files did not show up in the deleted files list; however, the event log claimed that I deleted 8,763 files on 26 August, and 3,420 files plus 5,326 files in two incidents on 27 August. I did no such thing!

Dropbox is not capable of deleting files on its own. It's simply not possible. The only way Dropbox can delete files is when it's told to do so through the sync process. If the Events page is saying you did it, then something on your device caused the deletion. There's no other way.

Look at the version history for one of the restored files and it will show you the device that the deletion occurred on. Start there and look for a cause of the deletion. If they're not in Deleted Files you can likely still recover them through the Events page.

bmwol

I've had exact same problem twice now, Dropbox randomly deleted 10s of thousands of files, I simply restored them and it didn't try again; it happened a few months ago and again today, there is nothing that would explain why it occurred!