Child Item

Mysterious mass deletions after moving to a new computer

Device
Mac Air 13" M5
Operating System/Browser (if using the web)
Tahoe 26.3
Dropbox App Version (if using the app)
244.4.6580

Question or Issue
Heavily use Dropbox for my business and love the application, however I just transitioned to new computer and when moved over Dropbox has been auto generating an enormous (tens of thousands...enough for Dropbox to send me emails wondering if something is wrong) number of files in the delete folder. These files have unusual names, none of which I have generated or used. They include names such as: Album-prepare-marker.plj, journalAttr.101616, .dat.nosync2FO.JZcDX8, and a lot similar to eat_jounalAttr_BCE8333B1-A91E-4B9D-97B6-65618...E9_6289556_95721.processed, an entire folder with: file cache.DAE6E2DC-BE92-42E1-A959-1A562426A8D9

There are a lot of others, these are just a few.

Can someone recommend how this can be addressed? It is clogging up my Dropbox, showing up in recent activity, and driving notifications to my email for things I haven't done.

Appreciate the support. Mike

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Comments

Walter

Hey @MikeK13 - thanks for bringing this to our attention.

Can you please send us a screenshot of the Dropbox desktop app's exact status as shown in your menu bar?

Also, are those deletions logged normally in your events page?

Let me know more and we'll take it from there.

MikeK13

Thank you for the response. I am attaching screen shots of both the menu bar (when I click on it) and the events page section with the mysterious file names (obviously there is more than what is shown). Note that the one sync error you see in the menu bar pull down is for one file/folder. We deleted it both from Dropbox online (cloud) and the computer but it continues to show as a sync error. That said, all other file sync'ing seems to work fine. Please let us know what the resolution of this is. MUCH appreciated.

Walter

Have you tried signing out of your account through the app's preferences and then back in and rebooting your computer since you first noticed this @MikeK13?

MikeK13

No we haven't. Let us do that and see if it makes a difference and then circle back to you with results. Thank you very much.

MikeK13

As shown below tried the sign out, reboot and sign back in but it didn't work. This is a screenshot of the app pull down from this morning. Other thoughts/remedies? Thank you.

Walter

I see, thanks for the additional information and the screenshot too @MikeK13. Can you let me know the exact steps you took when you moved to your new computer and installed the Dropbox desktop app?

Also, do you have any 3rd party apps that might be monitoring or adding files to your account by any chance?

MikeK13

Thank you Walter. We bought the computer from the Apple store and had someone at the Genius bar do the transfer from old to new computer. The Dropbox app, etc. was on our old computer and we use it the same way on the new computer. As far as 3rd party apps, we don't have any that I am aware of. Let me know if I need to uninstall Dropbox and reinstall, how to check for possible 3rd party apps I am not aware of, or other actions I should take to address this issue. Again, my thanks. Mike

Jay

Hi @MikeK13, do you have the Mac OS Photos app running on your machine, and are you storing that Photo Library in your Dropbox folder?

MikeK13

Jay - The Mac OS Photo app is on the machine, but it isn't running in the background. As to your second question, yes, photos are being backed up on Dropbox. Let me know what adjustments need to be made if this is a/the cause of the issue. Appreciate it. Mike

Jay

It is possible that these files could be part of the Photo Library, and are needed in order for it to work well. Since you migrated from one computer to another, these files might've been generated when linking to the current version of Photos on your Mac.

Are these files all in the Photo Library in the Dropbox folder, or are they also in other folders within the Dropbox folder?

MikeK13

Thank you Jay. I don't see the Photo Library as a subset of the Dropbox folder in Mac Finder. It is separate in the Favorites column (this maybe isn't what you meant but unfortunately I'm not as technical as you are). A few things I just noticed, (1) photos, old photos, are showing up in the Dropbox pulldown as added recently, say 55 min ago, yet the are years old and we haven't touched them, and (2) text files (see insert) are being shown as added, but again we aren't doing anything with Text Editor...however, the verbiage in these text files are words out of Word docs that are real. So confusing. Is there a way to restart fresh without losing all of our Dropbox data?? We can't lose it so that is critical. Again, appreciate it and let me know.

Jay

Thanks for the info. At this point it might be better for the support team to look into this in more detail.
You can contact them directly via this link, and they'll be able to investigate further.