Child Item

How to sync changes only from my online Dropbox account to my Windows machine and not vice versa?

I accidentally messed up two subfolders in my Dropbox folder, and deleted them. Dropbox was not running. I still have copies of those folders in my Dropbox account. How can I stop Dropbox syncing the changes to the cloud, i.e. deleting those folders from my account, when I run the app on my PC? I'd like to download them again from the cloud, but they're too large for this (many thousands of files).

I could uninstall Dropbox from my PC and delete the entire Dropbox folder, then install Dropbpx again, but I don't want to do that. I have far too many other folders and files, and it would take too much time to sync everything again. Is there any other way?

TL;DR I'd like to restore the two messed up and deleted folders from my Dropbox account to my PC. How can I do this?

Find more posts tagged with

Desktop

Sync

Windows

Insightful

Closed - Partially Delivered

Delivered

Accepted answers

Rich

Merill wrote:
How can I stop Dropbox syncing the changes to the cloud, i.e. deleting those folders from my account, when I run the app on my PC?

As soon as Dropbox starts and indexes your files, it will find the folders missing and remove them from your account. There's no way to prevent that from happening other than replacing the local files before you start Dropbox.

Go to the Dropbox website and download the folders manually, then put A COPY of them back in your local Dropbox folder. Once the folders are back, restart Dropbox. It should index your files, find no changes and continue as normal. In the off chance that the folders are deleted, you'll have a copy downloaded as a backup, or you can recover the files from your Deleted Files on the Dropbox website.

All comments

Rich

Merill wrote:
How can I stop Dropbox syncing the changes to the cloud, i.e. deleting those folders from my account, when I run the app on my PC?

Merill

Unfortunately I can't download the folders, they're too large.

Merill

Well, I created another user account on my PC and installed the Dropbox app there. I'll only sync those two folders and copy them then to my main user account.

Merill

Yeah, so much for that. The folders are online-only, there's no option to make them offline (no such option in the right-click menu). Dropbox says it's up to date. The default option in the settings has been set to offline.

What now? How can I get the folders to download to the local drive? This is on Windows 11.

Jay

Hi @Merill, there should be an option to mark the folders as offline. Could you copy and paste a screenshot in your next reply showing the context menu items of when you right click a folder?

Merill

There was not, but I did an advanced install according to the instructions on your website and now it's working.

But still, why couldn't there be one-way sync option? Accidents happen and if they do, there is currently no easy way to recover from them. Yes, there is an option to recover deleted files, but it would be simpler if there was a way to not sync known errors up or down at all.

Jay

Thanks for the suggestion. We appreciate the feedback on this matter and we take all comments into consideration when improving the Dropbox desktop app and services.