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Forum Discussion
davidboxer
8 years agoHelpful | Level 6
Dropbox overwrites new & local files with older versions and generates "conflicted files"-copy
I am a dropbox client for many years and have recommended it many many times, but now I'm a bit "irritated" to say least,... please help:
for unfortunate technical reasons i could'nt sync my huge d...
Yubie96
6 years agoNew member | Level 2
I just had this same thing happen to me and lost a ton of data and files. Yikes! I'm going to have to system restore and hope this fixes it. No matter what though, I'm going to lose very valuable data as my system restore point is over a week ago. I cannot "Restore" or "Revert" the linking event on my account's event page.
Dropbox team, please make a change to the application so that it will at least ask you if you want to overwrite files. This clearly appears to be a rare issue that has simply fallen between the cracks in the development. The scenario that we all appear to be experiencing is this:
-Dropbox is linked to computer and a local folder is created (mine was C:\Users\Name\Dropbox)
-Dropbox is unlinked (logged out), but files within that local folder continue to be modified and updated
-Dropbox is relinked (logged back in) and the same local folder is chosen (again C:\Users\Name\Dropbox). The user anticipates his local files will either be uploaded or the program will ask him what to do.
-The Dropbox program then completely wipes out that local folder and its files, replacing it with whatever is still within your account. Absolutely no warning that it is about to completely delete and replace everything. There was a mere request to rename a folder, to which I agreed because it didn't mention any deletions.
Please pass this on.
EDIT: Upon further inspection, what happened is the program just renamed the old local folder to "Dropbox (old)" and my files were kept there. PHEW! I see that this has been addressed after all, but nonetheless, the program probably ought to giver some notification to the user that it is doing this. I had no idea this had happened and was scrambling through the regular dropbox folder looking for my files.
Vic9948
6 years agoNew member | Level 2
Hi
Yubie96 wrote:I just had this same thing happen to me and lost a ton of data and files. Yikes! I'm going to have to system restore and hope this fixes it. No matter what though, I'm going to lose very valuable data as my system restore point is over a week ago. I cannot "Restore" or "Revert" the linking event on my account's event page.
Dropbox team, please make a change to the application so that it will at least ask you if you want to overwrite files. This clearly appears to be a rare issue that has simply fallen between the cracks in the development. The scenario that we all appear to be experiencing is this:
-Dropbox is linked to computer and a local folder is created (mine was C:\Users\Name\Dropbox)
-Dropbox is unlinked (logged out), but files within that local folder continue to be modified and updated
-Dropbox is relinked (logged back in) and the same local folder is chosen (again C:\Users\Name\Dropbox). The user anticipates his local files will either be uploaded or the program will ask him what to do.
-The Dropbox program then completely wipes out that local folder and its files, replacing it with whatever is still within your account. Absolutely no warning that it is about to completely delete and replace everything. There was a mere request to rename a folder, to which I agreed because it didn't mention any deletions.
Please pass this on.
EDIT: Upon further inspection, what happened is the program just renamed the old local folder to "Dropbox (old)" and my files were kept there. PHEW! I see that this has been addressed after all, but nonetheless, the program probably ought to giver some notification to the user that it is doing this. I had no idea this had happened and was scrambling through the regular dropbox folder looking for my files.
Did you find the "old" DB folder once the syncronization was completed? I have paused mine because I am afraid it will continue to delete my local files, for the moment it has not created an "old" DB folder... I am really really starting to panic...
- Yubie966 years agoNew member | Level 2
Vic9948 wrote:Hi
Did you find the "old" DB folder once the syncronization was completed? I have paused mine because I am afraid it will continue to delete my local files, for the moment it has not created an "old" DB folder... I am really really starting to panic...
All I can tell you is that in my case, my Dropbox folder was located in C:\Users\name\There, my Dropbox folder with the newly synced files was visible and then there was also a "Dropbox (old)" folder that had all the stuff I was afraid I lost.
Mine had completely finished syncing and I was about to do a Windows system restore to retrieve the files I thought I had lost. I just didn't get any warning that the application was going to do that, so as far as I could tell, I simply lost all my files. But no, it kept them all in a copy.
- Vic99486 years agoNew member | Level 2
Yubie96 wrote:
Vic9948 wrote:Hi
Did you find the "old" DB folder once the syncronization was completed? I have paused mine because I am afraid it will continue to delete my local files, for the moment it has not created an "old" DB folder... I am really really starting to panic...
All I can tell you is that in my case, my Dropbox folder was located in C:\Users\name\There, my Dropbox folder with the newly synced files was visible and then there was also a "Dropbox (old)" folder that had all the stuff I was afraid I lost.
Mine had completely finished syncing and I was about to do a Windows system restore to retrieve the files I thought I had lost. I just didn't get any warning that the application was going to do that, so as far as I could tell, I simply lost all my files. But no, it kept them all in a copy.
Thank you for answering! I was thinking of a Windows system restore as well, but I am not sure I have any "previous versions" saved to go back to, I can't find any. So I guess this is it. We should definitely get a warning from DB that this might happen, I see there are various cases with this problem, si it is not something so obvious. Thanks again!
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