Your workflow is unique 👨💻 - tell us how you use Dropbox here.
Forum Discussion
Klement99
1 month agoExplorer | Level 4
Impossible to Restore an External Drive Backup
Dropbox is an absolute joke!
If you back up an external drive and that drive crashes, congratulations — you’ve just discovered that Dropbox “Backup” is basically useless. You cannot restore the bac...
itahoki
1 month agoHelpful | Level 7
Dropbox “Backup” for external drives isn’t a restore-to-new-disk feature — it’s basically read-only storage you can browse and download. The web ZIP limits (“too many files”, size caps) are a known mess, so the browser route falls apart fast on real datasets.
If you need to rebuild a whole drive, one workable path is using an API-based sync tool (rclone or similar) to mirror the backup tree down to the new drive. It can handle huge folder counts and resume on disconnects. Also, on Business teams, double-check where that backup lives (member folder / permissions).
Windows or macOS, and is this a Business team or personal plan?
- Klement991 month agoExplorer | Level 4
Thanks for your help, you are appreciated.
About Delete, Edit, and Organize
Solve issues with deleting, editing, and organizing files and folders in your Dropbox account.
The Dropbox Community team is active from Monday to Friday. We try to respond to you as soon as we can, usually within 2 hours.
If you need more help you can view your support options (expected response time for an email or ticket is 24 hours), or contact us on X, Facebook or Instagram.
For more info on available support options for your Dropbox plan, see this article.
If you found the answer to your question in this Community thread, please 'like' the post to say thanks and to let us know it was useful!