Dropbox has lost all new versions of one of my documents!

Thanks for the ticket ID Andrew_Forge 

I was able to locate it in our system and passed your comments to the agent handling your case.

I can see that they're waiting for your response, so please take a look at your inbox and get back to them in order to continue troubleshooting. 

Let us know if you have any other questions in the meantime. 

Dear Walter, I replied to  the email but it was not updated on the ticket so it was closed and marked as "solved".  I raised the issue again under ticket number 17513787.  Unfortunately, they have concluded that there is no trace or any other versions of the file. 

I am 100% certain that the file was opened from the Dropbox folder, edited and then saved to the same folder repeatedly over many days or weeks prior to 9th June.  If, as they say, there are no file versions showing up then this is a critical error within Dropbox and I will have to look at an alternative cloud based storage system.  It is a great shame because I was an early adopter with Dropbox, have been a great fan and promoter of the system both in my personal and business life.

Best

Andrew

I just encountered the same issue with an .xls file I edit every day. On March 31 I upgraded Ventura to 13.3. Following that the last version of the file was February 17th with on versions since. All my daily entries are gone! Other files seem to have the latest versions but I'm reviewing more of them now!

Hi datamaker, I’m sorry to hear you’re facing the same issue.

After checking the rest of your files, did you notice the same behavior on multiple Excel sheets or just the one you mention? 

What steps did you follow in order to check the previous versions of the file in question?

I looked at activity for changes and saw none since the last changes in the file were made Feb 17. But I know I've made changes ... many. But no activity history showed until April 1 when I upgraded to Ventura 13.3. This could be an April Fool's joke -- but it's no joke.  In Mac Finder I used "Search" to look for files with  the word "conflicted" on the drive. I found around 10 in the Dropbox path that had the word in an appended file name. Example a <file>.txt also existed as <file>(earth.softridge.com's conflicted copy 2023-04-01).txt. The file with the word "conflicted" WAS up to date. 

I'm in the process of making the file with the long name including "conflicted" to be the regular file and saving the other for reference.

Note that I have the Dropbox folder on three Macs. All were set to sync local and on Dropbox cloud -- so all should be up to date. I've been doing this since 2011 without ever having an error ... much less a loss of file integrity like this. This was very scary since these files are logs and notes of my work and personal everyday activity.

I'm now going to go back to Time Machine and making sure it backs up Dropbox as well as other files. I'm also looking at Backblaze as an additional backup. I cannot afford to be afraid to lose file currency. This reminds me of the 1980's and floppy drives when you constantly had to worry a floppy would fail. 

Hey datamaker, thanks for the additional info and for your feedback here.

If I understood correctly, you did find the latest updates on your files, but instead of the original file, the updated versions had "conflicted copy" appended to them.

This happens when more than one person or computer is working on the same file at the same time.

To avoid this happening again, you'll need to make sure that only one computer has the file open at a time.

You can read more about this here.

In the link that is referenced about conflicted copy caused by more than one computer having the same file open, it states: "Note: The last version saved will always appear as the conflicted copy."  This results in the latest version of the file appearing to disappear! Although based on the description it was just renamed. I would prefer the latest file keep it's original name and the alternate file be renamed. When I have 10 files open at once I now have a lot of file moves to do to get my files back to normal working names. It is so strange that I've not had this issue in the last 13 years of using Dropbox. But maybe I'd not had the files open on more than one computer when I did a restart of one of the computers before?