Dropbox thinks I'm a new account even though I've been a subscriber for 10 years. I don't have access to my hundreds of folders and thousands of files.
How do I gain access again?
Hey @carol134, thanks for using Dropbox and welcome to the Community!
How long has it been since you last logged into your account?
Also, may I ask if you see any activity in your events page?
Did you maybe create a new account using another email address of yours by accident instead of logging into your old account?
Let me know what you find!
Thanks for the response, Walter,
I logged in earlier today, with the same address for the last 12 years.
The events page says "You have no activity yet"
Dropbox did not recognize my old password earlier today, so I changed the password, and that's when Dropbox considered me a new account.
Hey @carol134, that sounds pretty strange indeed.
If you go to your email account and do a search for "Dropbox" items, does it bring up any old Dropbox related emails from before this happened?
Just make sure to double-check if the address you see here, is the exact same one as your original email address, check that there are no typos in the email on the account etc.
Thanks for this idea. Yes, I have in my email account notices that says,
"Hi Carol,
A new web browser just signed in to your Dropbox account. To help keep your account secure, let us know if this is you."
This was posted in March. I was able to get access to my folders until May.
Thanks, Carol, for checking that!
Just to confirm, can you double-check if the address this email went to and the one you used to sign in the other day, are the exact same?
Check for any small differences like a "." anywhere, etc.
Also, could you possibly have any other devices connected to the account that you used to be able to access?
Hi Hannah, I used my laptop to try to gain access, but still there were no files in my dropbox account.
And, yes, the email that this went to is the one I got notices for my dropbox account.
I see, thanks for trying, Carol.
May we reach out to you via email, so we can investigate this further?
Yes! I would very much like that.
Is it OK to provide you my email via this forum?
Thanks, Carol, we already have it actually. 🙂
I just sent you an email, so we'll continue together there.
@Drilon wrote:Hello i had a acc in this gmail. but when i rejoined again it started from zero, pls can u help me get old acc.
When was the last time you signed in to the account?
If the account was idle for more than a year, it would have been deleted due to inactivity and you would now be signed in to a new, empty account. Unfortunately, once an account has been deleted, it's not possible to recover the account or the files that were in it.
I was inactive for maybe two weeks and today, when I try to log in, I get redirected to sign up.
Hey @johnhaig, sorry to hear that, that sounds a bit strange.
Did you receive some kind of email about this?
Or is is possible that you tried to sign in with a different address than the one you usually use?
I haven't received any message about this.
I have saved my credentials in the browser for automatic login, but when that failed three times I tried typing them in manually. That also failed.
When you say that it fails, are you getting some kind of error message?
If so, can you send us a screenshot, so we can check it out?
No error message, just the same result as using the presaved username and password.
Could you maybe send us a screenshot of the last page you can get to then @johnhaig?
Have you tried another browser by the way?
Unfortunately I cannot send the required screenshot, because I seem to have created a new account with the same credentials, so now I log into a completely empty folder. Is it possible to retrieve the previous files/account?
If you were able to create a new account using the exact same email address, I'm afraid it might not be possible to restore the previous account that was associated with this email address or any of the files that were stored in it.
That said, you can reach out to our support team for further assistance through this form. Just make sure to use an incognito window without signing into any Dropbox account and providing as much information as possible.
