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Impossible to Restore an External Drive Backup

Dropbox is an absolute joke!

If you back up an external drive and that drive crashes, congratulations — you’ve just discovered that Dropbox “Backup” is basically useless. You cannot restore the backup to a new drive. Let that sink in. A backup service that can’t restore to new hardware... Yeah, funny, I know.

Your only option? Crawl to the web interface like it’s 2005 and manually download your own data. And it gets worse: you can’t even download large folders. Try it and you’ll be slapped with “too many files” or ZIP limit errors. So instead of restoring a drive, you’re forced to download a few folders at a time, over and over, for thousands of folders. Absolute insanity. - Easy for Dropbox support clowns to say, just do it in small batches... Right. You do understand that some of your clients have subfolder within subfolders where some of those folders have large volumes of data? Oh, duh, just download one folder at a time. OK Dropbox Support Hero, how do I reliably rebuild all this manual intervention without accidentally losing valuable data? Come on guys! You should have a restore drive option that mirrors the data on your useless server with the new drive.

Dropbox Backup is not a backup service — it’s a data hostage situation. It’s fine for a couple of documents, but if you trust it with real data, you’re asking for pain. I paid for 2TB and got a masterclass in how not to design a backup product.

If you value your time, your sanity, or your data: stay far away from Dropbox

Our company has almost 40 team members, we are ALL moving to Google Drive the moment our paid subscriptions end.

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Comments

Neal

Hi @Klement99,

I appreciate you sharing your feedback and I can understand your frustration.

In regards to your feedback on backing up to an external drive, I'd suggest you read this post that goes through this subject in detail and what is and is not possible.

I know it may not be exactly the result you'd like but feel free to offer any further feedback that I can pass on.

itahoki

Dropbox “Backup” for external drives isn’t a restore-to-new-disk feature — it’s basically read-only storage you can browse and download. The web ZIP limits (“too many files”, size caps) are a known mess, so the browser route falls apart fast on real datasets.

If you need to rebuild a whole drive, one workable path is using an API-based sync tool (rclone or similar) to mirror the backup tree down to the new drive. It can handle huge folder counts and resume on disconnects. Also, on Business teams, double-check where that backup lives (member folder / permissions).

Windows or macOS, and is this a Business team or personal plan?

Klement99

Thanks, but this post is completely irrelevant to my issue. The real problem is that even after paying for your service, I’m forced to rely on third-party tools just to restore a backup drive. What is the point of isolating external HDDs from the main Dropbox account if you don’t even support a basic restore to new hardware? It genuinely boggles the mind that something this fundamental is not possible.

This is the kind of “feature” people only discover the day their hardware fails. It’s so basic that it’s almost laughable that you hide behind a forum post explaining how your product works instead of admitting it’s broken by design. Rather than pointing me to documentation that explains why your service doesn’t do what any reasonable person would expect a backup service to do, maybe focus on fixing the actual problem.

This is like walking into a liquor store, paying for alcohol, and then being told they only sell milkshakes — followed by a helpful poster on the wall explaining that it’s “technically not a liquor store.”

We’ve discussed this internally at our company, and not a single staff member is willing to go through the nightmare I had to endure trying to manually rebuild a 1TB drive. The risk is simply too high. As a result, we are moving entirely to a competitor that actually understands the purpose of backing up data.

I’ve gone through this forum in depth. It’s clear there is no solution, because Dropbox apparently does not believe this is a problem — which is a staggering oversight for a company that markets itself as a backup service.

Klement99

Thanks for your help, you are appreciated.

DCM1

Wow am I glad I came upon this thread. Was about to choose DropBox as the backup for my external drives! I agree calling this a backup is a misnomer if there is no possibility to restore other than doing it folder by folder manually. Totally ridiculous!

Klement99

You absolutely made the right decision!

It took me days to manually restore our data because of the ZIP size limitation. It constantly forces you deeper into your folder structure, and then you have to manually rebuild everything after downloading. It’s extremely inefficient and unnecessarily time-consuming.

Imagine renting a physical storage unit for your most valuable belongings — and when you go to collect them, you’re told you can only remove one item at a time, manually, over three to 9 weeks. That’s essentially the logic being applied here.

After a quick search, it’s clear there are far better alternatives available than Dropbox. We’re counting down until our annual subscriptions end. In the meantime, everyone in the company has already moved their external drive backups elsewhere.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem like an issue that will be resolved anytime soon — especially if the Dropbox team believes this approach is acceptable. Clearly they do not use their own service, otherwise they would have know how ridiculous this is.