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I thought I was deleting local files but deleted files from my Dropbox account

I have a laptop that I don't use often that's connected to my Dropbox account. I turned it on and was doing some stuff and needed to free up some space. So I went in with a disk scanner and found some old file trees I don't need on that machine and deleted them, thinking I was just deleting the local copies.

A couple of days later I got emails from Dropbox that said a new computer had logged-in (it's not new, but it has been a while since I used it) and that over 65,000 files had been deleted from Dropbox! When I went to look at them, all I could see are their file names, not their folders. I don't recall what folders they were, but they're old project files that I did NOT want to delete from Dropbox.

I'm not sure what to do now. I want to keep them on Dropbox but not on that laptop. What should I do to simply UN-DELETE them to Dropbox and wherever they were before -- but not on this laptop?

How can I see them as a file-tree with their folders? There are a lot of programming project files and dozens of them have the same names. (Actually, I don't really care, I just need to restore them in Dropbox but not on any of the machines connected to it.)

Also, what's the proper way of deleting big chunks of files on a local machine without removing them from Dropbox? (I didn't go through the Dropbox app or web site to delete them; is that necessary?)

I have a 2TB limit (Plus account) on my account, which I use mainly for backup. I don't think any of my computers could load in the entire list of files today.

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David S.118

nothing here, can't delete...

Mark

Have a look at Dropbox Rewind which may do it all for you in one go

David S.118

That looks promising, except the video blurred-out the details of the files he was using, so I'm not sure how to select the files I want to restore independently of the other files I was working with. Actually, I deleted a few FOLDERS. Is there any way to simply see what FOLDERS got deleted on that date and time so I can undelete THEM? I don't know or care what the files are, but the folder trees tell me all I need to know. All of the files in question were deleted within about a 3-5 min period of time while I had other activity going on around that. And the list has 65,000+ files in it, which is quite mind-numbing since if other file activity happened to be affected at the same time, there's no frigging way I'll be able to find them. But all of those files would be in totally DIFFERENT file tree.

Is there a way to get a list of folders (their roots) that were deleted and when so I can just restore them?

Also, how do I delete a bunch of files on one machine without impacting what's on Dropbox?

Mark

David S.118 wrote:
Is there a way to get a list of folders (their roots) that were deleted and when so I can just restore them?

Have you looked at http://www.dropbox.com/events ?

David S.118 wrote:
Also, how do I delete a bunch of files on one machine without impacting what's on Dropbox?

If they are inside of Dropbox's folder they'll update and delete across all other connected devices.

If you are trying to save space on a particular machine why not look at Selective Sync or Online Only instead?

David S.118

Looks like Events might work, but it's in chunks of files. Thanks. They really need folder-based operations when you're working with tons of files. With 65k, files, I'm not going through them one-by-one. It's like cutting off a branch of a tree: I'm not interested in the leaves, just the whole thing.

For Selective Sync or Online Only, will they delete the files that are there on the local drive? I don't need them locally, but I want them on Dropbox.

Rich

David S.118 wrote:
They really need folder-based operations when you're working with tons of files.

The closest option would be to just navigate your folders as you always do on Dropbox.com, and enable the display of Deleted Files within the folders.

David S.118 wrote:
For Selective Sync or Online Only, will they delete the files that are there on the local drive?

Selective Sync will completely remove a folder when it's unchecked in Preferences. When a file or folder is marked as Online-only, a "marker" is left behind on the drive. You can still see the file or folder but it doesn't take up space on the drive. If you (or any process on your computer) accesses a file that's marked as online-only, Dropbox will download it back to the computer and mark it as Available.

David S.118

Thanks for the help. I still think it's a little weird because I deleted a few FOLDERS and they want me to restore FILES (and buckets of files).

It's like saying you threw some bread in the trash and you want to pull it out and you get back all of the ingredients that were in the bread: flour, salt, yeast, etc. -- it got deconstructed. I don't know what the "ingredients" were, I just want the folders restored with whatever was in them.

I realize that Dropbox doesn't technically know what the folders were that I asked to delete, but it can reconstruct them easily enough by building a file tree diagram using the folder names. That would be great because it would let me see the entire file tree, not just a long list of files with dozens of them having the same names -- but in different folders.

If it displayed the current folder tree in Dropbox, with this one to the side, it would be really easy to select what to restore just by checking a box on the folders I want; or I could drill-down to subfolders and restore them.