We’re Still Here to Help (Even Over the Holidays!) - find out more here.
Forum Discussion
randomly deleted thousands of files this morning
I have ALL my work in my dropbox folder on my mac on an external drive. I've been using it for years. I have my work computer also syncing to an external drive. within dropbox, I have a special folde...
Shoot. an almost immediate followup to this post.
I just removed into my work mac to make sure that nothing funky was happening there. and it seems that my external drive was disconnected again. since I'm not physically there I cannot reconnect it (Disk Utility isn't seeing it so I can't just remount it).
I figured I'd update this post incase anyone else has this happen inexplicably, they'll know they aren't alone.
The reason that only the shared work folder had been affected is that is the first folder in my folder structure.
But what i still think is odd and inexplicable is that my work computer is set to online only, so in my mind, just removing the drive should not have ANY effect since all the files are online, accept ones i had manually downloaded to use at work. while my home computer which is set to be offline, was getting files removed, as well as in dropbox.com? why would a missing drive in online only files cause the online only files to be removed?
In any event, I'm glad I've found (I hope!) the cause of this. I've since quit the dropbox app on my work computer until i can reconnect the drive the next time in the office. so hopefully no more randomly deleting files!
- Rich
Super User II
msteinhofer wrote:
... it seems that my external drive was disconnected again.
And this is THE reason why storing the Dropbox folder on an external drive is NOT recommended. If the drive becomes disconnected while Dropbox is running, or Dropbox is launched before the drive comes online, Dropbox can see it as a mass-deletion of files and will sync that deletion to your account and other devices.
But what i still think is odd and inexplicable is that my work computer is set to online only, so in my mind, just removing the drive should not have ANY effect since all the files are onlineOnline-only doesn't matter. There's still a placeholder file on the drive, and if this file is deleted, Dropbox deletes the original file online.
... my external drive was disconnected again.If this is something that happens often, you want to move your Dropbox folder off of the external drive. There's no way to prevent this from happening if you store Dropbox on an external/removable/network drive.
Appreciate your input. And 100% acknowledge you're right.
That being said, with computers these days (Macs possibly more so than PCs) coming preconfigured with smaller drive and being cost prohibitive to have an internal SSD larger than 1TB, the only viable option is to maintain files on an external drive. One of the best things about dropbox is that it allows you to store your files on an external drive and still sync. If that was ever removed from the service, I would have to abandon it. As on my home computer, keeping files online only doesn't work well. Like, my issue today for example. If I were in online only mode at home, I would have had to manually download approximately 3GB worth of files before beginning work. which doesn't take more than a few minutes really. But this was to work on 1 document, And I typically jump between up to 10 projects through the day.
On my work computer I use online only mode because I am only using it to transfer files i work on at home to our server when I'm in the office.
Anyhow, my problem appears solved and I'm really just rambling now. The drive(s) in question don't unmount randomly. And I have redundant backups so I'm not totally at risk of loosing anything. Thanks for your input! 🙂
