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All files Dropbox in my personal account, were entirely deleted by Dropbox.

This is stunning and insult to injury Dropbox is a brick wall and provides no way to contact them for customer support.

I opened the files Saturday and was very confused to see only prompts for tutorials on starting using DropBox. There is nothing I perceive in deleted files, etc. I unfortunately had not saved my computer in past 6 months or so.

Very upset and shocked. There were interviews with a woman then in her 80s about her experience during WWII. She has since died. I also lost the last version of my book I based on her experience. Any help in restoring these files would be greatly appreciated.

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Megan

Hey @robyn4ryan, let's jump right into this!

Is it possible that you opened a new account, instead of logging into your old one?

Do you see any signs of your missing files in your events page by the way? This is the place where all uploads, edits, and deletions are normally logged so it should give you a hint.

Have you double checked the Deleted files page? Finally, do you remember when was the last time you accessed your Dropbox account in the past? Is there any chance that it was more than a year, and the account was deleted due to inactivity at some point?

In any case, please keep us posted, Robyn.

robyn4ryan

Thank you, Meghan, for replying. No, this was one of my two standby Dropbox accounts, one for each of my emails. I believe I used this in December, when I started working on my book again. Cannot locate Events Page. Deleted files is empty.

Anything else to try? This is heartbreaking.

Rich

robyn4ryan wrote:
Cannot locate Events Page.

She provided the link in her reply. Here it is again below. If there are no previous events listed, then you're definitely signed in to a new, empty account.

https://www.dropbox.com/events

robyn4ryan

Hello, I've been sick the past several days but am hoping to get more next steps to get my files back. I don't understand how this might have happened - opening a new account with my same email address, but more important is is there anything I can do to find the deleted files? Can I set up a time with someone on Dropbox to trouble shoot? Other next steps?

Thank you very much!

Robyn

Rich

robyn4ryan wrote:
I don't understand how this might have happened - opening a new account with my same email address, but more important is is there anything I can do to find the deleted files?

What does your Events page show?

robyn4ryan wrote:
I believe I used this in December

Are you certain that you last used the account in December? What about the email address for the account. Have you searched it for any emails from Dropbox? When was the last communication you received from Dropbox and what was it for?

Jay

Hi @robyn4ryan, if you're not seeing the missing files on the deleted files page, then there's a few possibilities as to why this might be the case:

The files are on another Dropbox account under a different email address
They were on a shared folder you don't have access to any more
The files were deleted outside of the 30 day period
The files were permanently deleted
Your account was deleted, and you've recreated your account after its deletion

Are any of these a possibility when it comes to your account?

robyn4ryan

Jay, Looking at your bulleted list I reviewed the emails from Dropbox and see that on January 18, 2025, Dropbox alerted me to a new sign-on on a new web browser (Safari), asking if that was me. I do not recall if I responded to that. What follows is a succession of maybe nine emails telling me what to do with my "new" account. This is all horrifying and I wish I had been on top of this. My gmail account used to be the good one, but has since gotten cluttered up with marketing emails.

What can I do now? Please say there is something. It appears that one new account overwrote the prior account? Can you search in some database under my gmail address?

Thank you!

Rich

robyn4ryan wrote:
I reviewed the emails from Dropbox and see that on January 18, 2025, Dropbox alerted me to a new sign-on on a new web browser (Safari), asking if that was me.

Was it you? Do you use Safari as your browser?

robyn4ryan wrote:
What follows is a succession of maybe nine emails telling me what to do with my "new" account.

How much time passed between the new sign-in alert and the emails about your new account?

robyn4ryan wrote:
It appears that one new account overwrote the prior account?

One account cannot overwrite another. If you went to sign in with the same email address and it created a new account, your previous account no longer existed at that time.

robyn4ryan

Yes, I believe it was me. I tend to use Safari, have created bookmarks there. I also checked my writing journal and it looks like I worked on the book on January 18, which was a Saturday. The emails started almost immediately. New sign-in alert was tagged 1/18 at 11:10 a.m. EST and then the first email came at 11:21 a.m.

robyn4ryan

Oh, forgot to add that events page shows "no activity".

Jay

If there are no events, then it would indicate that this is a new account, so there wouldn't be any record of an old account on the system, since it sounds like it was deleted, as it isn't possible to have two Dropbox account with the same email.

Was your Dropbox account a personal plan, or part of a Dropbox team?

robyn4ryan

It was a personal account. At one point I had some files in there that were part of a team.

Hannah

Hey @robyn4ryan, I hope it's okay for me to jump in here as well.

I would definitely suggest looking into any other email addresses you may have; go into any other email account you have and search for "Dropbox" to see if there's Dropbox communication on those addresses, which would mean that there's a Dropbox account linked to them.

Let us know what you find.