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Dropbox overwrites new & local files with older versions and generates "conflicted files"-copy

I am a dropbox client for many years and have recommended it many many times, but now I'm a bit "irritated" to say least,... please help:

for unfortunate technical reasons i could'nt sync my huge dropbox (256 GB+) for more than 6 mths

but i had a copy on my harddrive, wher ei worked and where, by the time, files were updated, of course, sinc i worked with them...

i just didn't/couldn't sync

now i m syncing, BUT: ( im terrified: )

dropbox does not realize that it should NOT overwrite newer files on my computer!

It overwrites the current files i had been working on during the last 6 mths, and generates a "...conflicted file..." copy.

i do understand the purpose, but this is totally wrong!!
Now I d be forced to manually rename all the file which dropbox has mistakingly "exchanged",... ??!

I just didnt imagine before, that dropbox would not realize, that aybe a file that was worked on recently should not be overwritten!? I dont get it.
It should be that the newer file should be kept and the older file (on the dropbox should be aded as a copy (older version file) - it has thus "deleted" 900 files!!!!! on my current system and thus totally kiled my system on which i WORK - i am a webdeveloper and have thousands of files...

Do u have any suggestions?

Also, now i need to find a way to recover the overwritten files (900+) !? Geez

I mean: What in the programmers minds makes them think i would like to replace a newer file with an older version!!?

This is crazy? Or is there something I don't understand?
Dropbox should be able to read the timestamp of the newer file on my local drive and realize that it should not overwrite the newer file OR AT LEAST ASK ME BEFORE!
But instead the "...conflicted file..." - copy should be a copy of the old file, so my current work dont get overwritten. etc.

Please help 🙂 Thanx!!

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Walter

Hey there @davidboxer - sorry to hear about this ( I saw you posted here as well - I'll reply to you here)

From what I understand, your computer must have been running the older version of our desktop application and hadn't been connected/updated in some time so when this computer was connected, it added files or folders to match the website.

Can you find this event in yoru Events page and see if you can revert it from there (by hitting the "restore" button - if you see this event logged there that is).

As for the conflicted files, please take a look here.

I hope this points you to the right direction David - do let me know what you find and how this goes.

davidboxer

Hi, thanx for answering.

1) My current version is 53.4.67 - it should be the newest.
So this should not be the reason.

2) we re talking 900+ files, the event page has hundreds of entries.
I can't even remember which of the 1.5 mio files were (partially automatically) changed in th last 6 mths, so manually restore them is not a helpful idea, nor is the suggestion

3) that i should move files I work on to a different folder. I am not using the dropbox for teamwork in this case, but or backup and access via diff computers myself. I m not a hobby holiday image dropbox user, I got 1.5 mio work files which partially get changed manually, partially when database files get updated by other applications, etc.

Again: I dont get it: in windows and linux every file got several timestamps, right?
a) created
b) last modified
c) open, etc.? right?

Example: How (in the heavens) can Dropbox decide to overwrite a newer file that I modified (and is still open in my editor) YESTERDAY with an old file from December 2017?

I mean the Dropbox is integraded into the windows ~file handler system etc. - so how can it confuse these time priorities?
I had this very same problem on a different computer some year ago, but then I thought i had done sth wrong. But now i was more alert and the same thing happens.... again!

PLUS: It should at least warn me / ask me (once) if i really want to overwrite newer data with old data.

I use windows 10 and no, my clock is set correctly

Thanx for helping

Walter

Thanks for the elaborate response David ( @davidboxer).

I understand your track of thought here and I'd really like to help with this in any way I can. Therefore, I found your open case within our system and will work on it with the agent currently handling it, if you don't mind.

The conflicted files created by this process ( sorry to be vague but I don't have a visual of your whole work flow) - are a safeguard to avoid losing any of your data.

In regards to the large amount of your .mio files just note here is that the performance of our app can decline if you have more than 300,000 files synced to your computer depending highly on the hardware specifications of the computer running the app of course.

In any case, I am passing your comments to our dev team as well David - thanks for your feedback.

If there's anything else I can do from my end to assist further with this, do let me know and I'd be happy to follow up on any inquiry that you might have. Thank you!

davidboxer

Well, I am sorry, but how can you say the problem has been solved when I didn't say so?
I should be the one, that it had been solved. It hadn't nor did i use an old version of dropbox. I am a programmer and I will check those basic questions, of course.

This has not been solved. It has been cleared though:

Dropbox allowed me to upload 1.7 mio files in 250 GB of a 1 TB budget, but now it can't handle it. Support told me that Dropbox has problems with more than 300.000 files, yet didn't tell me about this before! - I mean, just tell the user : "Warning: you're about to upload more than 300.000 files, this might produce problems, your Dropbox might crash every time(!) you want to start it. " - well, it actually says: "more than 300.000 files, might take a while" - well, believe it or not, after 1.5 years thrugh maybe 30 installations or more and across 3 computers i couldnt get it to run any more, it's starting for hours or even days, then suddenly without throwing an error: crashing. I throwing money out the window, i can't use dropbox basically for more than a year, plus it has overwritten newer data, who pays for that? - Your system just can't handle that many files on a win10, intel7 highend ssd pc notebook, and it seems u can't admit it, or what do i know, since it s not open source.
In the end, I got a final recommendation to try to download the thousands of folders one by one manually! That's not what I call solved, unless u send my someone to my office to do that for e during the next few weeks (and pay him). You didn't solve anything. Sry.
I ll save this answer on a diff. system just in case

Supporter: "David, ich habe unsere Experten kontaktiert. Es ergab sich, dass die einzige Lösung momentan ist, die Daten über Dropbox.com Stückweise auf Ihren Rechner herunterzuladen. "

"David, I contacted our experts and it turned out that the only solution is to download the data to your computer via Dropbox.com bit by bit."

-speechless-

Walter

Sorry for jumping the gun here @davidboxer - I've un-accepted my answer as the best one here and I'll leave this up to you from now on.

I understand this is not optimal as you'd be needing to download your files/folders in smaller batches as you mentioned and I'll make sure to pass your comments to the team for review as well - thank you for your feedback.

If there's anything I can do to assist(wish I could come there and help :nerd: )please let me know.

bensig

I can attest that this also happened to me with a small, but important file. v59.4.93

Edited the file on my computer, saved, reopened to verify it was changed. Attempted to open it on my phone - opening it may have caused it to be "modified" and then there was no revision with the changes I had made.

Lusil

Hi @bensig!

Initially, are you able to locate any changes relating to this via your events page? Also, are you still able to see the file with the updates in your Dropbox folder? Could it be that the changes didn’t sync across to the website and connected devices?

Finally, could you please hover over the Dropbox icon that’s next to your desktop’s clock and send me a screenshot (omitting personal info) of what it reads?

Thanks in advance!

NeilDrop12

Hi, has the overwriting & deleting issue been solved? The same thing has just happened to me.

I re-linked a computer which I had previously had Dropbox on and had to unlink it some time ago as I am able to use only three computers. So I re-linked it about 1/2 hour ago.

Clicked my way though the options and Dropbox offered the same name as before for folder, clicked ok and ... I see that my existing derectory has been blitzed by Dropbox.

All my newer files are deleted and wherein there are files with existing names, Dropbox has replaced with older versions from cloud. I have lost months of work.

Is there a way of rolling this back?

Thanks guys

Lusil

Hi @NeilDrop12, thanks for nudging us here - welcome aboard!

I'd be happy to help, so I've sent you a ticket to the email address connected to your Community profile.

When you get the chance, check your inbox and we'll go from there. Cheers!

Yubie96

I just had this same thing happen to me and lost a ton of data and files. Yikes! I'm going to have to system restore and hope this fixes it. No matter what though, I'm going to lose very valuable data as my system restore point is over a week ago. I cannot "Restore" or "Revert" the linking event on my account's event page.

Dropbox team, please make a change to the application so that it will at least ask you if you want to overwrite files. This clearly appears to be a rare issue that has simply fallen between the cracks in the development. The scenario that we all appear to be experiencing is this:

-Dropbox is linked to computer and a local folder is created (mine was C:\Users\Name\Dropbox)

-Dropbox is unlinked (logged out), but files within that local folder continue to be modified and updated

-Dropbox is relinked (logged back in) and the same local folder is chosen (again C:\Users\Name\Dropbox). The user anticipates his local files will either be uploaded or the program will ask him what to do.

-The Dropbox program then completely wipes out that local folder and its files, replacing it with whatever is still within your account. Absolutely no warning that it is about to completely delete and replace everything. There was a mere request to rename a folder, to which I agreed because it didn't mention any deletions.

Please pass this on.

EDIT: Upon further inspection, what happened is the program just renamed the old local folder to "Dropbox (old)" and my files were kept there. PHEW! I see that this has been addressed after all, but nonetheless, the program probably ought to giver some notification to the user that it is doing this. I had no idea this had happened and was scrambling through the regular dropbox folder looking for my files.

Vic9948

Hi, I think am having exactly the same problem. I noticed that my Dropbox App was not synchronising because the files I had in my phone and in my PC were different, and those I could see in the dropbox on line were also different (all three were). So I realized that somehow -don't know why- the DB application in my PC was not working or was not installed, not sure what happened. So I downloaded it again and when it started synchronising it, it started overwriting all the local files I had in my PC (I mantained the same local Dropbox folder I was using and that I have used for the past 9 years since I installed DB for the first time), and downloading or "copying" the folders and files as seen when I enter DB online from Chrome. When I started noticing this, I panicked and paused the synchronization, but sadly the majority of folders are empty and its files, gone. I am afraid of resuming the process and losing all the files that were in my Dropbox folder of my PC, which are the files I always work with and thus the most updated ones.

What I want in my local Dropbox folder are the ones that were in my PC, not the ones I have online in the DB cloud, I wanted the online DB website to update and "reflect" what I had in my PC, not the other way around. What shall I do to keep the ones I still have in my local folder and revert the process and get all my files back? I am quite desperate :-( Thank you

Vic9948

@Yubie96 wrote:
I just had this same thing happen to me and lost a ton of data and files. Yikes! I'm going to have to system restore and hope this fixes it. No matter what though, I'm going to lose very valuable data as my system restore point is over a week ago. I cannot "Restore" or "Revert" the linking event on my account's event page.

Dropbox team, please make a change to the application so that it will at least ask you if you want to overwrite files. This clearly appears to be a rare issue that has simply fallen between the cracks in the development. The scenario that we all appear to be experiencing is this:

-Dropbox is linked to computer and a local folder is created (mine was C:\Users\Name\Dropbox)
-Dropbox is unlinked (logged out), but files within that local folder continue to be modified and updated
-Dropbox is relinked (logged back in) and the same local folder is chosen (again C:\Users\Name\Dropbox). The user anticipates his local files will either be uploaded or the program will ask him what to do.
-The Dropbox program then completely wipes out that local folder and its files, replacing it with whatever is still within your account. Absolutely no warning that it is about to completely delete and replace everything. There was a mere request to rename a folder, to which I agreed because it didn't mention any deletions.

Please pass this on.

EDIT: Upon further inspection, what happened is the program just renamed the old local folder to "Dropbox (old)" and my files were kept there. PHEW! I see that this has been addressed after all, but nonetheless, the program probably ought to giver some notification to the user that it is doing this. I had no idea this had happened and was scrambling through the regular dropbox folder looking for my files.

Did you find the "old" DB folder once the syncronization was completed? I have paused mine because I am afraid it will continue to delete my local files, for the moment it has not created an "old" DB folder... I am really really starting to panic...

Yubie96

@Vic9948 wrote:
Hi
Did you find the "old" DB folder once the syncronization was completed? I have paused mine because I am afraid it will continue to delete my local files, for the moment it has not created an "old" DB folder... I am really really starting to panic...

All I can tell you is that in my case, my Dropbox folder was located in C:\Users\name\

There, my Dropbox folder with the newly synced files was visible and then there was also a "Dropbox (old)" folder that had all the stuff I was afraid I lost.

Mine had completely finished syncing and I was about to do a Windows system restore to retrieve the files I thought I had lost. I just didn't get any warning that the application was going to do that, so as far as I could tell, I simply lost all my files. But no, it kept them all in a copy.

Vic9948

@Yubie96 wrote:
@Vic9948 wrote:
Hi
Did you find the "old" DB folder once the syncronization was completed? I have paused mine because I am afraid it will continue to delete my local files, for the moment it has not created an "old" DB folder... I am really really starting to panic...

All I can tell you is that in my case, my Dropbox folder was located in C:\Users\name\
There, my Dropbox folder with the newly synced files was visible and then there was also a "Dropbox (old)" folder that had all the stuff I was afraid I lost.
Mine had completely finished syncing and I was about to do a Windows system restore to retrieve the files I thought I had lost. I just didn't get any warning that the application was going to do that, so as far as I could tell, I simply lost all my files. But no, it kept them all in a copy.

Thank you for answering! I was thinking of a Windows system restore as well, but I am not sure I have any "previous versions" saved to go back to, I can't find any. So I guess this is it. We should definitely get a warning from DB that this might happen, I see there are various cases with this problem, si it is not something so obvious. Thanks again!

tannerg3

Thank you. After lots of tears and desperately searching the internet archives, you finally have helped me recover two years of work.

mevsme

I have exactly the same situation and I use updated Drpobox!

My case:

- I edit files. Then I upload them. Then I pause Dropbox.

- my friend edits files and save at 3 pm

- I edit files (and I don't have his edits, i don't care). I save mine at 7 pm.

- I start DropBox and it overwites my file with his, my newer file with his OLDER!

WTF Dropbox???

I don't even get "conflicting copy"

and there is no my file in file's history, file's hitory get truncated to his date, e.g. 3 pm

I have just lost 4 hours of work because of this dumb behaviour

and now I need to spam with file versions to not lost my edits again.

But I have a solution - I move to Google Drive

jeez

Henri999

I have been terrified of this happening since starting with dropbox a decade ago and have so far protected myself using a very basic "workaround" on every machine I have used.

Step A: Make sure on installation that the DROPBOX folder is not situated inside your "documents" hierarchy.

Step B: Create a folder called "FORDROPBOX" with all your documents as sub-folders of this folder.

Step C: Use a regular auto-run of a copying routine to copy the FORDROPBOX folder into the DROPBOX folder.

Believe it or not I am still using Karen's Replicator to auto-run this daily routine. So there exists a kind of firebreak between the WEB dropbox and my own working documents. Perhaps this helps someone - it is no solution after the disaster has happened.