My online-only files got deleted after deleting my account, and now I need help recovering them.

Wfreeman

I made a mistake and deleted my Dropbox account not realising that I must have set some critical folders to online-only years ago, and now they're gone. I don't recall setting them online-only but I think it's the only explanation.

I did check that I had what I needed - the files looked fine in Explorer, but it seems that for some reason they show as full size even though they're just stubs.

When I uninstalled the Dropbox app these 'files' promptly disappeared. There was no warning when deleting the account or uninstalling the app. It would have been good if something popped up saying "Hey you know you have a ton of stuff that's not actually on your PC, right?"

My secondary physical backup drive turns out to be dead (another thing I didn't realise - you can't use an SSD as an offline backup drive!!)

I have opened a ticket to try and get my account reopened: #26407193, but the support person has gone quiet on me. I'm sure that like other major cloud services, the files are still on the server for 30 days or more but I'm still worried I'll miss my chance. Can anyone help? How do I escalate this?

Megan

Hey there, @Wfreeman, sorry to hear about that!

First, please keep in mind that when a Dropbox account is deleted, your files will stop syncing, but they are not automatically removed from your computer. You can find more details about how this works in our Help Center article here.

For security and privacy reasons, Dropbox cannot reactivate an account once it has been deleted, and the content becomes unrecoverable. However, because the Dropbox desktop app functions just like a standard folder on your computer, any files that were fully synced before the account was closed should still be accessible locally on your linked devices. Have you made sure this was the case? To help locate them, you can try searching locally in your File Explorer for specific file names to see if you get any results.

Lastly, regarding your active support ticket, I confirmed that the agent has received your response and will get back to you as soon as possible. Our standard response time is usually within 24 hours on business days, unless you are on an Enterprise plan, which includes one-hour responses at any time.

Please let me know if you need any further assistance!