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Forum Discussion
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...
Neal
Community Manager
Community ManagerHi Klement99,
I appreciate you sharing your feedback and I can understand your frustration.
In regards to your feedback on backing up to an external drive, I'd suggest you read this post that goes through this subject in detail and what is and is not possible.
I know it may not be exactly the result you'd like but feel free to offer any further feedback that I can pass on.
Wow am I glad I came upon this thread. Was about to choose DropBox as the backup for my external drives! I agree calling this a backup is a misnomer if there is no possibility to restore other than doing it folder by folder manually. Totally ridiculous!
You absolutely made the right decision!
It took me days to manually restore our data because of the ZIP size limitation. It constantly forces you deeper into your folder structure, and then you have to manually rebuild everything after downloading. It’s extremely inefficient and unnecessarily time-consuming.
Imagine renting a physical storage unit for your most valuable belongings — and when you go to collect them, you’re told you can only remove one item at a time, manually, over three to 9 weeks. That’s essentially the logic being applied here.
After a quick search, it’s clear there are far better alternatives available than Dropbox. We’re counting down until our annual subscriptions end. In the meantime, everyone in the company has already moved their external drive backups elsewhere.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem like an issue that will be resolved anytime soon — especially if the Dropbox team believes this approach is acceptable. Clearly they do not use their own service, otherwise they would have know how ridiculous this is.
