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Dropbox folder on macOS suddenly missing tons of folders which are visible on other machines + web

Hi all,

Last night I used the Dropbox website to upload a bunch of files and folders from an old / failing external drive. I used the website rather than my local folders because the total size of the content I wanted to upload exceeded the amount of free space on my MacBook's internal drive (where my Dropbox folder lives), so copying everything into the Dropbox folder and waiting for a sync wasn't going to work.

The files I uploaded via the web worked fine, and I can see everything I uploaded along with all my older / previously-uploaded files and several dozen folders on my other computers, and on the Dropbox website. However, now when I look in my MacBook's Dropbox folder, it shows a bunch of files and only 4 folders - a huge number of folders are simply gone now. The Dropbox app on my Mac keeps insisting that it is fully synced and up to date, and nothing changed after a reboot.

How do I get my folders back?!

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Accepted answers

Hannah

Hey @Huxley_D, sorry to jump in here.

This is strange behavior indeed, but we'll get to the bottom of this.

Can you check your selective sync settings, to see if you can see all your folders there and whether they are selected or unselected?

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Walter

HI there @Huxley_D - sorry to hear about this.

Could you have a look at your backups page and let me know if you can find your folders there?

Also, what can you find in your events page about this?

Keep us posted!

Huxley_D

Hi Walter, thanks for jumping in!

1. The Backup page shows nothing - 0 files, 0 bytes of data

2. The Events page shows thousands and thousands of entries, because some of the folders I've uploaded in the past ~24 hours (i.e., web archives) contain a whole lot of small files nested in subfolders

I'm scrolling and scrolling through the Events, but all I can see are entry after entry for "you added XX files" - nothing has been deleted, which is good!

Huxley

Hannah

Hey @Huxley_D, sorry to jump in here.

This is strange behavior indeed, but we'll get to the bottom of this.

Can you check your selective sync settings, to see if you can see all your folders there and whether they are selected or unselected?

Huxley_D

Oooooh - this looks useful and relevant! It looks like all but a couple folders are deselected in the "Selective Sync" panel. That probably explains what's going on, although I'm totally baffled as to how it happened. In any case, I've reselected all of them and they're starting to repopulate in my local Dropbox folder. Thank you for this tip, you're a life (and sanity) saver!

Huxley

Hannah

Thank you for all your kind words, Huxley!

I'm glad I was able to help. 🙂

If you need anything else, don't hesitate to let us know.

Have a wonderful day!

Raurele

I'm having this issue as well, but it's requiring me to DOWNLOAD all 2TB of my data if I even want to view them on my Mac. "unselected folders will appear only on dropbox.com"
How is that okay? I dont have that much space. I just want everything displaying in finder, and downloaded if and when I need it... what has changed? its always worked, now its not?