Child Item

Recover deleted files to new location

Hi. My wife somehow deleted 4,000 files back in October and did other things that I fear may be zapping her dropbox. I can still restore these files (I think) but I want to restore to a new location, e.g. create a folder called recoveredfiles and send everything to it. Recovery to original locations seems easy enough but I don't see anything on changing the location. I'm surprised there doesn't seem to be any way to do this. Or is there? Thanks!

Find more posts tagged with

Restore

LOL

Comments

Rich

@rwilliams17 wrote:
... I want to restore to a new location, e.g. create a folder called recoveredfiles and send everything to it.

Dropbox doesn't have that option. You can only recover files to their original location.

rwilliams17

Thanks Rich. I feared that was the case. I'm disappointed that what I want isn't possible, as it seems like it wouldn't be very hard to do.

What makes this so bizarre is that it looks like a mega folder was deleted, but files were still being accessed somehow through .dropbox.cache! My guess is that when she couldn't find files she searched for them and found them in the cache, and kept using the cache.

This makes me very nervous, as I fear files may have gotten deleted or corrupted in the cache. Indeed I am surprised the files were even there as I thought the cache got cleared every few days. I recreated the mega folder but I fear it has problems that may not get discovered until it is too late to fix them.

My possible workaround:

Rename the current version of the megafolder, e.g. rename myfolder to xmyfolder

Recover the old megafolder

Rename the recovered myfolder to zmyfolder

rename xmyfolder back to myfolder

I'll definitely do a complete backup to an external drive before I do anything!

Does this seem reasonable, or are there perils I am overlooking, or else is there a simpler/safer workaround?

Thanks again.