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Deleting online-only files made me lose all my files, how do I prevent this in the future?

When you have files synced to online only and then you delete the files from your local device, all of the files get taken off of dropbox.com never to be recovered? I lost a s*** load of files this way, but I am not sure why it happened.

Someone please clearly explain this: if I sync online only the file should be available on the website? No? And the files will not be available on my own device? So if I delete the files from my own device why would that possible delete the files on dropbox?

What I want is to have the files online, and delete any trace of them on my computer. But I don't want to upload directly to the website because it takes WAY too long, it would take years to upload 5tb to the website directly, sync on the other hand works much faster for some reason.

Do I need to be using some other method besides online only to do this like dropbox backup method?

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Hannah

Hey @ewb123, I hope it's okay for me to jump in here as well!

You don't have to make your folders online-only, before removing them with selective sync.

You only need to make sure that they've finished syncing to your account when you add them to your Dropbox folder.

Once the files are fully synced, you can simply remove them with selective sync and they'll get removed from your local Dropbox folder, but will still be available on dropbox.com.

And, of course, they'll be available for you to sync them back to your local Dropbox folder any time.

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Jay

Hi @ewb123, thanks for bringing this to our attention.

When you mark files as online-only from your Dropbox folder, they will remain on the site, but the files are replaced with placeholders in Explorer/Finder, with a tiny file size.

This will allow you to quickly see that file names in your Dropbox folder, and open them when needed (as they'll download to your computer). However, deleting those files would be the same as deleting a normal file, so the version on the site would also be deleted.

To answer your last question, you could move files in batches to your Dropbox folder from the external drive, mark them as online-only, and once the space is freed up continue with the moving.

If you have any further queries, feel free to message back.

ewb123

Thanks this clearly answers my question much appreciated. I have a feature request that is important: when you use online only and go to delete the placeholder files it should give a warning dialog to the user saying “if you delete these files they will also be deleted in the clouds”, because it did not give me this warning and because it’s counterintuitive to some people that this would be the case I lost over 1-2tb of my files. So dropbox and my own misunderstanding was the cause of me losing my files instead of dropbox supposedly functioning as a tool to protect and backup my files. This was a sickening experience and now I know what happened. This needs to be fixed , I an SURE I am not the only one who has lost A LOT of files this way. Also there should be a way once they are online to delink the placeholders, so that if the placeholders are deleted it would not delete them from the cloud. I can’t believe this has not already been implemented. I don’t work for dropbox, and these seems obvious to protect peoples files. I am trying to helps so this [removed] doesn’t happen to other users again. [removed]. An obvious oversight. Once it was uploaded to online only its not so obvious to the user that deleting the placeholders on the computer would also delete them in the cloud, very dangerous and probably has lost many of your customers their files due to this being unclear.

Jay

We appreciate the feedback about the online-only placeholders.

We take all comments into consideration when improving the Dropbox app and services.

Rich

@ewb123 wrote:
Also there should be a way once they are online to delink the placeholders ...

If that was your intent, use Selective Sync to remove folders from local drive completely.