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Forum Discussion
All my files shows as 0 bytes both on desktop and website
Hi, I have been using DropBox for years. I recently had my laptop stolen and when I went to login to my DropBox it has told me that my DropBox has been full since April (without my knowing). Aside this however, nearly all of my documents (pre-dating April) now show as 0 bytes (on Dropbox through web and on desktop). I don't know how to get these files back. Given my DropBox storage had reached capacity in April, presumably all files before this were saved. Everytime I try and open there is nothing there !
5 Replies
- Hannah
Dropbox Community Moderator
Thanks for bringing this to our attention, ruth_willmott.
It's strange that they show as 0 bytes on the website as well, but let's see what we can find.
If you look through the version history of the files, are you able to find and restore previous versions of your files with their actual size that can be previewed?
Let me know what you find.
- Jay
Hi ruth_willmott, as that file, and presumably others, show up as zero bytes on the Dropbox site, this means that somehow empty files were synced to the site via your desktop machine.
Due to this, there wouldn't be any data to recover from those files via Dropbox, since they were originally uploaded like that.
Is it possible that you had another cloud provider scanning the Dropbox folder, and marking those files as online-only?
Hi Jay, when you say other cloud provider - what do you mean? Like OneDrive or GoogleDocs?
- Jay
Exactly, it could be any other service that allows you to upload or sync files to their own service. There are numerous services, such as iCloud, Backblaze, and even other services like Github or TortoiseSVN which do versioning of files, so I won't be able to list them out in their entirety.
It could even be security software which could quarantine files (marking them as zero) for some reason until you need access to them.
