Child Item

Some of my files appear as 0 bytes and I can't open them/restore a previous version.

Hello All,

Starting sometime this week, a large number of files in one of my folders are showing as "0 bytes" and I obviously cannot read them.

I'm synchronising the folder with my mac, and thought maybe my mac corrupted the files? (I definitely did not use those files in the past months). I thought to 'recover' them from the dropbox.com site by going to "Version History" for each file but when I click on that I get to an error page:

Error
Something went wrong. Don’t worry, your files are still safe and the Dropbox team has been notified. Check out our Status Page to see if there is a known incident, our help center and forums for help, or head back to home.

So I am also not sure how to recover these files? Very strange

Find more posts tagged with

Desktop

Restore

Web

Mac

Insightful

LOL

Closed - Not for right now

Comments

Nancy

Thanks for posting this on our forum, @paintSmart!

Are your files showing as 0 bytes both on your desktop app and the Dropbox website?

Can you send me a screenshot of how these files currently show in your local Dropbox folder? I'd like to check their syncing icons and make sure they're not online-only (in which case they wouldn't be taking up space from your local device).

If you’re on a Basic/Plus plan, which offer a 30-day file version history and you haven’t used those files in months, then it most likely won’t be possible to restore a previous version of them. However, I'd like us to look into this further first to make sure there's not something else going on.

Let me know what you find, and we'll go from there.

paintSmart

Hi Nancy!

Attached is a screenshot, they just show as 0 bytes on both my mac and also on the website

but you can see some of the files are working correctly.

I don't think this is 30 day file issue. I think the data somehow got corrupt on dropbox. Why would going to the Version history page cause an error? (The Version History page also doesn't work for files which are working.)

In the events page i cannot see any events to do with those files.

Thanks again for your help

Nancy

Thanks for the extra info! Have you tried accessing their version history via a different browser and the Dropbox website still gives you an error? If it does, please send me a screenshot of it, as well.

paintSmart

Hi Nancy,

There doesn't seem to be any logic to the filetype. there are some JPG files which are working, and others which are 0 bytes. The issue is with jpg, pdf, psd, pptx. So also doesnt seem like its specific to only one filetype
I have just used Brave to access dropbox.com and see the same issue (0 byte files). I'm also seeing the same issue with the version history. here is a screenshot:

As reminder, this error happens for ALL files (both that work and also those that don't work). I cannot see version history for any files.

Thanks!

Nancy

Apologies for the delay, @paintSmart! So, if I get this right, those files looked normal and they weren’t showing as 0 bytes prior to this week. Is this correct?

Can you also try one of those browsers perhaps? While Brave is a Chromium browser, it’d still be better to test this on a supported browser, so that we can isolate the issue a bit more.

paintSmart

Hi Nancy,

Just tried with Safari, again I get an error with the Version history page and the same files are 0 bytes..

Thanks

Megan

Hi @paintSmart!

I'm going to need some additional tools, in order to look into this. This is why I sent you an email, in order for us to have a closer look into this.

Reply back to me, and we'll take it from there. Thanks!