I can't access the Documents and Download folders on my Mac

[BryanmMac]

've lost access to my Documents and Downloads file on my mac - help??

I started a thread back in July and have created workarounds. When it asked whether I wanted to sync/back-up Desktop, Documents and Downloads folders, I said no, because when I did this with a previous account, this caused problems. I thought that this would mean that my Desktop files etc would just remain on my hard drive, and I would have a Dropbox folder with things I wanted to back up to the cloud.

But this has caused all the icons to disappear from my Desktop!

 

Logging out of Dropbox didn't help. I tried uninstalling DropBox and reinstalling and that also did not help.

 

Please help.

[Hannah]

Hey @BryanmMac, thanks for reaching out to our Community.

Let's see what we can find out about this.

From what you're saying, it sounds like you did previously enable the Backup feature on this computer, because without Backup, you wouldn't have had Dropbox syncing icons on your Desktop files.

Did you recently get a notification to update Backup on your Dropbox app maybe?

If you go to your backups page online, do you see that this particular computer is being backed up?

Let me know what you see.

[BryanmMac]

This is what I see. I do not believe I have Backup enabled.

I need my Documents and Downloads returned to local control.

[Hannah]

Thanks for the screenshot, Bryan.

So, this tells me you had enabled backup, but it's unlinked for some reason.

If you go through the Dropbox app preferences, click on the "backups" tab and then on "manage backups", what do you see there?

[BryanmMac]

Here is what I see:

[Rich]

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@BryanmMac wrote:

Here is what I see:

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Click the Manage backups button... THEN what do you see?

[BryanmMac]

There are no backups listed. 

[Megan]

Hey @BryanmMac, when you say that your Documents and Downloads are missing: do you have problems locating them both locally, and online when looking at your Dropbox account? 

Would you mind checking your events page, and letting me know what you see there? The Events page at www.dropbox.com/events gives you an overview of all activity in your account including files events (adds/edits/deletes). 

[BryanmMac]

Hi @Megan, I want both folders to remain on my MAC and not be located within my Dropbox file system. I don't care if I lose sync access.

[Megan · Accepted solution]

Have you tried out the steps my colleague, Hannah provided in this thread on how to revert your content back to their original locations?