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I can't access my photos, as I'm being asked to upgrade my Dropbox account.

I REALLY need help, please. A very long time ago my wife and I wanted to put our photos, many of them precious, in a safe place. She suggested putting them om a USB but I said we should put them on something called "Dropbox" It was free and safe. What a fool I was. Over time it said my account was "getting " full so I deleted as many things as I could and things were fine. Then without using my account much at all I went to it and it says it's full and I have to pay a large sum of money, which I don't have, in order to get into my account. It seems like kidnapping. If I were to pay the money I don't even know if I could get my photos back without deleting them all. The only thing I can think of is, paying the ransom, downloading the photos to my hard drive, moving them to a USB (my PC is old and I can't fit in a USB and a wireless USB in at the same time) and terminating my account. Even then I'm afraid I will lose everything because it says that by terminating your account all of your data will be deleted. I really don"t know what to do. Wow, do I feel like u sucker.

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Rich

@Marshal mellow wrote:
Then without using my account much at all I went to it and it says it's full and I have to pay a large sum of money, which I don't have, in order to get into my account.

Your files are not being held for ransom and you don't need to pay to access your account. You should be able to sign in to your account and download your files without issue.

What, exactly, is happening when you try to sign in? If it's prompting you to upgrade, you can usually just close that modal and continue to your files. Please provide a screenshot if you can, being sure to mask any private information.

Marshal mellow

Super user II; Thank you very much for your help as far as we have gotten. The site is prompting me to upgrade as you said. Being somewhat ignorant as to things PC I am not sure what you mean by closing the modal but I will continue and see if it is what I think you mean. Also, I have never made a screenshot but I downloaded a free app and I will see how it goes.

How is that?

Nancy

Hey @Marshal mellow! Hope it’s OK to jump in.

To take a screenshot of what you see, you can click on the PrtScn key located on your keyboard (on the upper-right side of most keyboards, or next to the Space Bar on some). After that, your screenshot will be most likely saved in the Pictures folder of your computer.

You can then upload it to our forum by clicking on the following button above your message box:

Marshal mellow

(odd things are happening)

Dear Nancy,

Thank you very much for replying to my message. I sat down with my PC all ready to follow your directions and I realized that I have a big problem. I live in Japan and I have a Japanese keyboard. It doesn't have PrtScn. I'm going to see if I can do it using my phone

(you would know better than I do) I will tell you that I'm only able to see a handful of photos using my PC but now I'm able to see possibly all of my photos on my phone for the first time in a long time. Any way I'm going to give it a shot. I'm kinda stuck although it is nice that I can see my photos now.

I'll read what it says on the Dropbox page on my PC.

Upload anything

3.74GB of 3.25GB

Upgrade for more

I was able to make a screen grab with my phone and it's in my photos but it's just sitting there and there doesn't seem to be anything I can do with it.

Now I feel bad that I wrote all this nonsense. Maybe it would be best if I experiment and figure out how to follow your directions. What I'm really afraid of is that I will lose all of my photos by, for example , downloading them all to my hard drive or a thumb drive. I would like to know something, my account seems to fill without me adding anything or just taking some photos and then it says I'm out of space. Is there a way to stop that or am I hallucinating?

Thank you for your time Nancy

Marshal mellow

Dear Nancy, sorry I have nothing but problems, but, I decided to crop a photo and I saved it. Now it just spins round and round non stop and whatever I push doesn't stop it. Any ideas?

Hannah

Hey @Marshal mellow, I'm glad to see that you were able to see and access your photos in your account.

Regarding your account being full, is it possible that you have any shared folders or backups taking your space?

You can see your shared folders here and your backups page here.

Marshal mellow

Dear Hannah, thank you for your reply.

I clicked shared files and it says 335 MB which amazes me since I removed so many photos. At any rate, I clicked Backup and it says "you've used up your 3.25 GB of storage space. My son's sports, 2MB and you're asking me for 1500yen(we live in Japan) a month for the "free" account I got years ago. I also have a problem which may be a bit unusual. First, I would like to empty my account and put my data on a thumb drive Oddly, Because my PC is so old, I suppose, I'm not able to insert a thumb drive and a wireless USB adapter at the same time because there's no space and it seems I need them both in at the same time. Are you as confused as I am? I don't want to be paying for this for the rest of my life but I don't dare close my account because by reading the small print it says that closing your account you will lose all of your data. I'm scared to death of losing everything. My wife and I are on Social Security and certainly cannot afford to pay 1500yen a month. Maybe not, but it seems like I've made a mess.

Thank you Hannah for reading all this

Marshal mellow

By the way, I don't want to be a jerk.

Marshal mellow

Dear Hannah,
It's possible that I may be driving everyone crazy for no good reason. I have a son who is certainly smarter than me and he has suggested that I may have opened two accounts? Does that make sense as to solving all my problems 😕?

Hannah

Hey again, @Marshal mellow!

The issue here is that your account is full, correct?

So, what we need to do is find out what's causing your account to be full.

You mentioned that you checked your backups page, right? Does it show you any files there, that might be taking up your space?

Marshal mellow

Thank you Hannah but I don't know what the backups page is

Walter

Your backups page is the page that lists the files and folders you've backed up to Dropbox @Marshal mellow

Do you see anything there?

Marshal mellow

Different subject but I just cropped a photo as it said it was saving it it froze and now I can't get into any photos. Please 🙏 help

Nancy

Hi again, @Marshal mellow! Are you still having trouble with this? Can you access your photos via another browser, as a test?

Marshal mellow

I was in a total panic as you might guess. I was able to access them using my phone but I don't know about my PC because I don't have access to it now. I assume it will be okay but I'll see tomorrow. Thanks 🙏

Marshal mellow

Dear Nancy,

I got the strangest email today. It says that I deleted files. I didn't purposely delete anything. Could you tell me what that's about? It's making me quite nervous.

Richard

Megan

Hey @Marshal mellow, the first thing you need to check is if the email is coming from an official Dropbox domain, just to make sure it's a legitimate one.

If that's the case, then you may want to check your deleted files page, and events page just to have an idea of what's happened to the account.

Here is an article that'll help you restore any content.

Is it possible that you might have accidentally moved your content, or removed it from within your Dropbox folder locally?

Marshal mellow

Thank you for writing 🙂. I'm a bit nervous so before I follow your directions to restore files (apparently I have too many) I will tell you what I got... from dropbox.com/home. You recently deleted 8296 files from your Dropbox account. If you want there files back you can still restore them until2025-01-18. After that they will be permanently deleted.

These are the files you deleted.. then there's a bunch of gobbeldy **bleep** that I can't open. Apparently there my files. I'll just end for now with that I can't believe I could possibly have that many files, just pictures of my family and friends and I don't have that many friends. At any rate something very strange is going on, if you have any more advice.

Thank you so much for your help and time.

Richard

Megan

Hey @Marshal mellow, it sounds like the deletions might be coming from a shared folder.

In any case you'd need to check your events page, in order to have a better view as to what happened, and restore your content if you wish.

You might want to take a look at the relevant Community thread where my colleague @Jay explained why deletions happen.