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Dropbox Backup deactivated itself, when reactivated rewrote local folder.

Hi everyone,

I’m dealing with a very unusual and serious Dropbox were I'm at risk of losing great portions of my lifes work. I've been in contact with support and I have been elevated to advanced support - but progress is slow. I'm in the middle of a very busy season work-wise and I need at functioning dropbox - which is now paused to prevent further file loss.

Short version of what happened:

On December 4, I discovered that moving two large Logic project folders (WO23 Logic and WO24 Logic) from my local macOS ~/Music folder into a Dropbox directory had failed — the destinations were incomplete.
When checking Dropbox Backup to restore them, I noticed that Backup was shown as “deactivated since August 6”, even though I never turned it off.
When I reactivated Backup, Dropbox began creating a completely new backup of my Mac instead of showing any older backup snapshots.
During a support call, I was instructed to try clicking “Rewind folder” to check for restore options — but instead of showing versions, Dropbox replaced my local ~/Music folder with a symlink pointing to a CloudStorage path containing only a small, incomplete set of files.
At this exact moment, several large conflicted folders were generated.
I found a partial (~312 GB) version of the Music folder inside one of these conflict folders, but large portions were missing — especially ".logic" (*Logic the music production app from Apple.) Most harrowing - my most recent huge projectfolder "WO25 Logic" was completely empty).
The Logic folders WO23 Logic, WO24 Logic, and WO25 Logic are now either completely empty or far smaller than they should be (originally 30–80 GB each).

What is missing:

All missing items are .logic project files — dozens of large Logic Pro sessions.

Paths involved:

Original folder location (not inside dropbox - only backuped up by dropbox):

/Users/Christian/Music/Logic/WALLMANS/WO25 Logic

Failed move destination (WO23/WO24):

…/Dropbox-MoreMusic/08 Arkiver/Logicarkiv/Wallmans Logicarkiv

(This is now inside a conflicted folder.)

Symlink destination after Rewind failure:

/Users/Christian/Library/CloudStorage/Dropbox-MoreMusic/.../Mac/Music

My main questions:

Has anyone seen Dropbox Backup deactivate itself or lose access to earlier backup snapshots without user action?
Has anyone experienced Rewind replacing a local folder with an incomplete cloud state?
Is it possible that my pre-August backup snapshot still exists in Dropbox’s system even if it isn’t visible in the Backup UI?

Advanced Support is investigating, but I would really appreciate input from anyone who has dealt with Backup failures, missing snapshots, conflicted copies created during backup, or unexpected symlink replacements.

I've paused syncing on all devices for now - but this seriously halts my workflow. Is it safe to resume syncing? Will dropbox fix itself? Are my backups gone forever because of the seemingly deactivated state from august 6th? Are my missing files from /music-folder hiding somewhere?

Thanks in advance.

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Comments

Megan

Hey there, @interstahler, welcome to our Community!

I just checked on our system, and I was able to locate your active ticket. Your case has been successfully escalated to our specialized team in order for them to investigate further. Hang tight, I understand how important this is for you.

In the meantime, I'd suggest sharing these concerns with the agent working on your case, and wait for further instructions since they have all the info necessary to guide you. I'll definitely keep this post open, and I suggest any of our users that faced a similar situation to chime in and share what did the trick for them.

Thank you for your patience! If you need anything else, let me know.

interstahler

Thank you for answering. I can't risk leaving a stone unturned, so if anyone knows anything about this, your feedback would be much appreciated.

Also - before all this I was at 7-8 TB / 9 TB total. During this process (which is now frozen by me until I get the all clear) my dropbox bloated to 10,5 TB / 9 TB and I get warnings about being above the limit. I just don't want to risk further complications. Do you guys temporarily increase my limit or do I need to do something? I'm guessing the extra 2-4 TB comes from sync-errors/duplicates - so not really my fault?...