Thousands of personal photos deleted after exceeding storage limit – Please escalate to Dropbox staf

Question

Hello Dropbox Team,

I am urgently asking for help from a Dropbox employee, not just community advice.

I have been using Dropbox for many years and stored my personal photo archive there, including irreplaceable family memories dating back to 2003.

I received the email warning that my Dropbox Basic account exceeded the storage limit and that files could be deleted if I did not reduce my storage usage.

Unfortunately, a large part of my photos has now disappeared. They are not in the Deleted Files section and I cannot recover them.

These are not just files—they are over 20 years of my personal memories, many of which exist nowhere else. I am devastated.

I respectfully ask that a Dropbox employee review my account and escalate this case to the appropriate team.

If there is any possibility of a server-side recovery, backup, snapshot, internal archive, or any other recovery method, I am asking you to please check before these memories are permanently lost.

Even if recovery is not normally possible, I would be incredibly grateful if someone from Dropbox could personally review my case due to the exceptional sentimental value of these files.

Thank you very much for your time and assistance. I sincerely hope someone from Dropbox can help me.

Mark · Answer

This looks like a broader server-side sync issue that needs urgent attention.

It isnt. If you were over quota, as the emails and warnings state, your files are removed. Dropbox deletes them at the back end, it doesnt do it via a control on your device.

If you were over quota and didnt delete things as you were warned the files are removed.

tiffanypham_2904 · Answer

I am experiencing the exact same server-side indexing issue!

My account has most of data affected. The entire folder directory structure remains completely intact, but both Size and Last modified fields display as --. This confirms it is a backend metadata corruption / reference failure, not user deletion.

My Tier 1 ticket has been completely ignored for days without progress.

@Dropbox Staff  / Moderators: Please escalate both of our cases to Tier 2 / Engineering team immediately! This looks like a broader server-side sync issue that needs urgent attention.

Nancy · Answer

Thanks for your post, @Makbule, and sorry to hear this happened.

I’d like to start off by saying that we don’t have any account-visibility here, as this is a public forum.

If you’re currently on a Dropbox Basic account, you have 30 days from the time of the deletion to restore those files (we can’t guarantee any possibility of recovery outside of that window, I’m afraid).

In any case though, I’ve logged a ticket for you, in order to look into this further. Please reply back to it, when you see it in your inbox/spam folder.

See you there!